By the Swing of the Pendulum
by Yuzernaime
Summary: After escaping a mental asylum, Nimh and her dog struggle to survive in Silent Hill. Nimh believes she can free them from the town's horrors if she can just remember her past, but the more she uncovers, the darker and more violent her world becomes.
1. The Journal

(Disclaimer: I do not own Silent Hill or anything associated with Silent Hill. I do not intend to profit from this writing, it is solely for my own pleasure. _The Secret of N.I.M.H._ referenced in this story belongs to and was written by Robert C. O'Brien.)

_Day 1_

_The fire is small—doesn't give off much warmth—but it's better than nothing. The flame is about the size of my fist and barely reaches a few inches off the ground. It does not burn so much as it glows, but the orange light is almost cheerful. I feed it with scraps of newspaper and pieces of splintered wood. There's plenty of rotting wood and detritus around; things that never seem to run out in this town._

Wake. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. These are all she knows. She is trapped in a white, white room. Her eyes see but her mind does not register the colors and the shapes. She is basic, thoughtless, an animal in a cage.

_This town. Can I even call it such? A place where demons lurk in the shadows, reaching with their razor-laden hands and strangling fingers, a place where fires burn eternally under the ground…can you still call it a town? The only things left that even resemble a town are the remains of the decrepit buildings and the whispers of the people who once lived here (if, indeed, this place had human inhabitants at all). The rest is, for lack of a better word, madness._

She can hear them behind the door sometimes, scraping, moving filthy scuffed shoes across the tile. Always when she is trying to sleep, always when her eyelids are weighted with exhaustion. She flinches on top of the bed and shrinks back into a corner, burrowing into the covers.

_I have come to believe people did, at one point, in another time and dimension, live here. The parked cars on the street, some of them with booster seats in tow, the doodles and drawings hung up on the walls of the school, the graffiti winding along the brick walls of the alleys—these things suggest that this town was once functional, full of sun and sound and people. Not like now. Now, I'm not sure of what this place is. You could call it limbo or purgatory, a place of endless repetition of fear and suffering. Of sleepless nights. Of bloodied hands. Of starving and scavenging._

She is frozen in terror, her widened eyes staring over the tops of her knees. The things behind the door want her, and there's only a metal door between them. She closes her eyes tight, trembling, sweating, wishing it all away.

_I say 'scavenging' aloud and Kodiak turns his head toward me. His snout sniffs at the air, wet tip twitching. The glow of the tiny fire glints at me in his brown eyes. He's a Rhodesian Ridgeback; I looked that up in one of the books in the library. They're enormous dogs, with a ridge of hair along the spine. They're bred to hunt lions. Kodiak hunts something a bit more frightening than that. He lies with his hairy back against my thigh as I sit here cross-legged._

_I scratch him behind both ears and under his chin. His eyes turn to slits of contentment, his tail wagging back and forth. Kodiak is my only friend in this hell. I have three companions: him, the handgun on my belt, and the shotgun strapped to my back. Together, we get along pretty well. I have only lost a chunk off my right ear and a fingernail so far. Kodiak is missing nothing. He's more careful than I am. Dogs usually are more alert than peop—_

—_Had a scare just now. I had to pause my writing when Kodiak jerked his head back and stared out the door. He did not give me the sign for danger, that is, he did not stand up and start growling. Something, some noise or vibration, had caught his attention. You never get used to the fear when the darkness comes, but you do learn how to control it some. Having Kodiak with me helps._

Her heart is vibrating and feels like it's going to burst. She finally faints from fear and everything goes black. She slips into the dreams again.

_God, my hand is shaking. I write to keep my thoughts in focus. This notebook was lying on a teacher's desk at the school, centered right in front of the chair and behind the faded nametag, as if I were meant to have it. The pen was harder to come by; I found it on one of the nurses I'd killed at the hospital. Don't worry, I haven't committed some heinous act against an innocent medical personnel. It was she who stabbed at me first with her rusted scalpel, swiping blindly but accurately, stumbling towards my light. They like to go for the throat, the nurses. They have pretty good aim for creatures with no faces, only twisted remains, bandages of flesh wrapped around the infantile head._

_Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I've just given up my contract for sleep tonight. Might as well write until my eyes can't take it anymore._

The dreams are wonderful at first—she is running free, there is green grass and clean air and there are smiling faces waiting to embrace her. Then the sky darkens, the faces turn into shadowed masks, monstrous with their clown grins, bulbous noses and empty sockets. She runs away, straight into a nightmare.

_What is this place? The name printed on the store signs and pamphlets and newspapers says 'Silent Hill'. The name is vaguely familiar, an old memory that refuses to surface, a word on the tip of the tongue. I have dreams of a life before this. Some of them are nice, full of beauty and wonder. Some of them are more…unmentionable. I have come to stop thinking about the dreams. They only tempt me. _

_I'm keeping a record of my time here, partly to keep my sanity and my head in order, and partly to preserve my story. When I move this pen across this paper, my existence shifts, and I can look at it as if from behind glass. It feels good to write. For a while, I didn't know if I could ever do anything functional again. I was trapped._

_I can feel the memories surfacing. I've tried to repress them, but their cries for attention have amplified to screams trailing into the night. Kodiak senses my discomfort and puts his head on my leg. He is my only other anchor to sanity as I begin to write my story._

_I suppose I'd better start from the beginning. Kodiak and I weren't always together. Before that, things were much, much worse. Before we met, my fate in this hell was sealed, and the demon had me where he wanted me._

Her senses are on red alert. She knows someone is out to kill her, a cat waiting for the mouse to come out and face the claws. If she can just sink into this mattress and become invisible, become small…

_Fuck all of this! _

She wants to escape she wants to escape she wants to escape she is—

_I used to think Silent Hill was purgatory. Not anymore. Purgatory suggests afterlife. There is no death in purgatory._

—trapped. Sooner or later, she will have to come out.


	2. What Lurked Behind the Door

Memory 1:

I remember waking up on a bed in a white room. My feet were bare and I was wearing a crisp white medical gown. The walls were tiled and the lights fluorescent. I couldn't look at the lights directly; if I did, they caused a throbbing in my skull. There was a toilet on the opposite wall of my bed and a sink next to it. The wall tiles were tainted with a red-brown coating, like rust, or the dried blood of a murder scene. The latter thought disturbed me, and so I told myself the walls were just stained from wear. The other option was not possible in my mind, at least not without me losing my nerve. When I tried to recollect why I was there, my mind came up as blank as the room I was in.

For eighteen days, I was in that room, although I cannot be certain. Time for me then was like water—fast flowing at times, stagnant and unmoving at others. I tried to measure time by the food I received: toast and cereal for breakfast, soup and sandwich for lunch, and some kind of meat with a vegetable for dinner. The first three days I didn't eat, and the food went bad in the corner of my cell. Eventually I had to eat, and I did so gingerly, testing for poison, although that's a laugh. You either eat the food and die, or you don't.

The food sustained me, but it had an ashen taste, as if it were made from something unnatural. Someone slid the food from a hatch under my door three times a day. It surprised me every time the tray came screeching across the linoleum floor. I ate it slowly on my bed and tried to figure out why I was there. My head felt clouded and light, as if someone had stuffed my memory full of cotton. Most of the time in that little room, I would lie on my bed and try to remember why I was there.

I think they put drugs in the food. It's the only reason I can think of why I was so sanguine, unless I had suffered some kind of amnesia. More likely it was a combination of the two. I had nothing to do but try and put together my own mind, which was scattered into pieces.

Flashbacks of my former life sometimes came to me in dreams and in random thoughts. I remembered brushing my teeth in front of a bathroom sink, a woman's voice calling up to me. I dreamed that I was running towards a Ferris wheel at a carnival, a boy's hand in my own, my nails painted bright pink and black. I had visions of many buildings, and large classrooms, and floods of people walking here and there. In another vision, I was walking along rows and rows of animal cages, looking into wide, reflective eyes, some scared, some confused, others longing.

A nightmare: _People in rows and rows of seats on a flight heading north, somewhere over West Virginia. The steward asks me if I'd like something to drink, but I decline. The smell of dry air and the reek of microwave food. The steward rolling down the aisle to the next row, his cart squeaking. The shaking of the seats and rattling of the baggage above me. An announcement from the pilot that we will be experiencing turbulence, the authoritative and calm voice cut off by high-pitched static that makes the woman in front of me wince and cover her ears. _

_The shaking turns into sharp quakes and people begin to cry. More quaking, then pitching, and people are thrown from their seats. A suitcase frees itself from its cabinet and knocks the flight attendant senseless, his eyes roll up into his skull. People scrambling over him in the aisles as the nose of the plane dips, and then there is chaos as the plane rolls and plummets and passengers fall over me and on top of me. I am suffocating, the cabin has depressurized and there are people piling on me and my chest feels like it's going to cave in and…_

After the nightmares started, I began to wait by the door when the food came. Every time the hatch slid open, I lowered my head to try and catch a glimpse of whoever was feeding me. The result was always the same: the hatch opened, I lowered my gaze, the tray slid in but I could not see. I tried pounding on the door and screaming. I tried lifting the hatch and groping around with both hands outside, pleading for help.

"I survived the crash!" I would scream, throwing my body against the door. "Can anybody hear me? I'm not fucking crazy! Get me out of this fucking room!"

By the eighteenth day, I had bruises all over my body from my efforts to break out. I refused to eat the food they gave me. I threw it and smeared it all over the walls. Eighteen days worth of food piled up in the corner, forming a rancid heap that stank and oozed and no one bothered to come in and clean it up. Perhaps they meant to drown me in my own filth. By then, I was dying for a voice, any voice other than my own. I had even tried to ram my bed frame against the door, pushing it with all my might, but the bed legs just screeched against the floor and left blackened tracks. The door was scratched but it did not budge.

My pleas for freedom were eventually heeded, but to my own horror and dismay. I had thought anything was better than being trapped in that little cubicle of a room. I was wrong.

***

My door opened on the evening of the eighteenth day. When the door creaked open, I had just enough sense to grab a knife (they had provided me with cutlery, how considerate) before I dashed out of the room and into a dark hallway. The only light source I had came from my room. I blinked and pleaded with my eyes to adjust quickly to the darkness. The hall smelled like a hospital mixed with some harsher chemical—formaldehyde, perhaps. By then, I was convinced I was in some kind of prison, and so I did not cry out for someone.

I turned to my right and crept down the hallway in the dark. Barefoot, I took careful and quick steps, with my free hand in front of me and my knife hand at my side. I had a death grip on that knife. Hercules could not have pried it from my fingers. It was a good sign, a sign that I still had determination and strength and hope.

If I had known these were the things that gave my tormentor the most pleasure in breaking, I would have taken the knife to my flesh and ended me.

The hallway turned and seemed to never end. I came across several doors, but they were locked tight. The silence began to unnerve me. It pressed in on my ears and made me hear things. At one point, I thought I heard an old man weeping behind one of the doors I'd stumble into. He was crying and mumbling, the only words I caught were "forgive" and "war." After that, I could have sworn a baby was wailing…no, it was screaming. Someone or something was torturing it, the cries were at the peak of volume and agony, shrill and grating on my ears and unbearable for my heart to behold.

I turned a deaf ear to these sounds. Human cries did not affect me, they only fueled my fear and desire to flee. But I could not ignore what I heard next. I had just found a set of double doors when the high-pitched yelp of an animal in pain sounded out in the dark. Spinning around, I nearly dropped my knife as I ran, my bare feet padding along the cold floor. I stopped and listened. For a good while, there was nothing, and I thought: _Maybe I am just hearing these things. Maybe I'm going insane._

Then the dog yelped again, louder this time. I groped blindly until my fingers curled around the handle of a door and I slid the knife in the crack, slashing up and down, trying to unlock it. The dog whimpered, there was a thud and a mechanical grunt, and the dog cried out again. What were they doing to it? The sound was a hammer that shattered my heart and I began to weep.

"Please!" I cried hoarsely, slamming my shoulder into the door, tears running hot down my face. "Stop it! Don't hurt it!"

And the door swung open, tipping me onto my knees. I nearly impaled myself on my own knife. While I was busy, trying to stand up, someone or something seized my arms and squeezed with such force that I dropped the knife. Before I could do anything, I felt a sharp pain pierce the meat of my thigh and I went under.


	3. Two Doctors

Memory 2

_These next events, I have to take one step at a time. I don't want to say what happened, but it's important that I tell someone, anyone, even if it's just a diary. Sometimes people go their whole lives holding something horrible inside of them, and they carry that burden with them until the end, like a disease. I am not that strong of a person. I have to tell, have to get it out before it consumes me. If someone does ever read this, I am sorry I could not provide you with a happier story. _

_For what it's worth, there is some glimmer of hope at the end, but whether or not this hope grows in vain, has yet to be decided._

When I wake up, I quickly lose whatever humanity I had restored by trying to escape. I am bound to a metal examination table, the kind with the drains on the side. I am drugged and my mind is in shambles. My wrists and ankles are clamped tight, but loose enough that I can wriggle; a worm on a hook.

A figure looms over me. I fight my restraints and strain my muscles, but it's of no use. Breathing heavily, heart pounding and blood pumping, I force myself to look into the eyes of my captor. He steps into the red light shining from above, and I think, despite the scorching hue of the light, of how freezing the metal is against the skin of my back where the medical gown parts. The figure is just a man in a lab coat: stooped, lean, his face haggard and his cheekbones pronounced. The red light shines on the goggles he wears. His eyes are dark, fathomless craters.

I try to ask him where I am, but the drugs inhibit my speech. What comes out of me is a pathetic, low squeak. He smiles. His teeth are impeccably white and small. He puts a gloved hand to my head and presses it down, not roughly, but with the care of a scientist preserving a specimen.

"Relax," he tells me. His voice is clipped, professional, but with a rasp that sends chills down my spine. I flinch and shiver under his touch. "We're going to make sure nothing is wrong. There are many tests, but we have to be thorough, now, don't we?"

Again, I try to speak, but nothing comes out. I can only stare at him stupidly.

He has a cart next to him, with blunt shapes arranged neatly. Some of these shapes are narrow and glint in the red light. He selects something off the cart, and I crane my head to see.

"Nurse!" he barks. There is a sound like a displaced joint rubbing against a socket, popping and squelching, and an hourglass figure lurks behind him. There is something unnatural about the posture—slouched to one side, head titled, I wonder if she is deformed. I do not want to see the nurse, but my eyes refuse to close. She shuffles into the light and I can see her bloodstained uniform, ripped and torn, the mottled gray skin of something freshly drowned, but her face, her face is an abomination. There are no eyes; there is no nose or mouth. She is blank, as if a fresh sheet of flesh had grown over all her features. She is bald and, like a cruel joke, a nurse's cap is placed on top of her head.

She has scared me so bad that fresh adrenaline is wired through my veins. For a moment the drugs weaken and I have just enough strength to cry, "Let, me, go!" before the nurse lowers a needle and pricks my thigh. I lose all my focus and my head wheels. I'm going for a ride, a scary one, but it's scary in the soul-tearing way.

Then, as if through liquid, I hear the faraway rev of a saw. I see the nurse hand it to the doctor and he squeezes a trigger and the noise spits out again. The world becomes a film slowed down frame-by-frame. I can feel every nerve in my body twitching, trying to ward off the inevitable.

They don't bother taking off my medical gown, like in a real autopsy. Autopsies are for dead people. I am very much alive.

The saw screeches and he makes the first cut, right along my sternum, going up, up, up. The pain smashes into me. I can't move. I can only scream in my head.

The smell of burnt bone greets my nostrils. _My_ ribcage, sliced open. Between the stabs of pain I hear him tell me:

"I'm Dr. Scythe, and you're going to be my patient for a long, long time."

He revs the saw again, lowers it, and I black out.

***

"Annie! Annie, wake up!"

Someone shakes my shoulders, rocking my head back and forth. I come out of it fighting, clawing, pushing away whoever is shaking me. My screams are ragged and my throat feels as if I have swallowed shards of glass.

"Annie, it's okay! It was just a nightmare," says a man's voice. Then, softer, "Open your eyes."

I do. I am lying on a long therapist's couch. The man shaking me has his hands on my shoulders and is peering at me from over his glasses. His eyes are baby blue, and his hair is long and is parted down the center; it hangs over his forehead and down to the end of his neck. He has high cheekbones, a long, straight nose, and strangely sensual lips. There is just a hint of stubble on his chin. He is wearing a navy blue, pin-striped suit.

"What--" I start to say, but he shushes me.

"You were having a nightmare." He holds up a gold pocket watch that dangles on a long chain. I can hear the ticking in the stillness of the room as he says, "I hypnotized you and it went wrong. I'm sorry. That, doesn't usually happen."

I rub my chest where I can still feel the cut of the saw. "Oh God, it felt so," I start to say "fucking real", but for some reason I can't bring myself to swear. "It felt so real."

"Like you were actually there?" the man inquires. He has a light British accent.

I nod several times. "More than real…it must have happened, it must have." But the nightmare was already slipping through my fingers, the details vanishing like a cloud of breath on a window.

"Annie." He sits back into his own chair now that he sees I'm ok. Or at least, I think I'm ok.

"We have to go over what you saw. Think you can handle that?"

It is fading fast from my mind. There is a lingering sense of fear inside me that he must be able to see on my face, because he is giving me a genuinely concerned look.

"Who are you?" I ask. "W-why am I here?"

This takes him aback, and his brow furrows and he picks a clipboard up off the floor and writes something on it. He sets the clipboard on his lap, then folds his hands. He has long fingers. "My name is Dr. Theo Rutilus. And you're here because, quite frankly, you're not well."

"Oh, dear," I blurt, and bring my hand to my mouth. That was not something I would normally say, was it? Something catches my eye. There is a pink plastic medical band around my right hand that reads:

Patient Name: Annie Starr

If found, call Stonewall Asylum immediately

323-444-6766

Dr. Rutilus watches me read this. "Bit like a lost pet, isn't it? I assure you, it's only for safety measures. You've been admitted to Stonewall for an extended period. Are you saying you don't remember anything prior to this dream?" He poises his pen for my response.

"Well," I begin, and my tongue feels glued to my teeth. What do I remember? I wrinkle my forehead and try to recall. My name is Annie Starr, I'm seventeen years old, I go to Rochester High School and my best friend's name is,

"Nichole!" I cry out. Dr. Rutilus writes something, and the scratching of his pen gets on my nerves. "Where is Nichole Mantle? She was admitted here, too."

Dr. Rutilus looks surprised. "I don't believe we have any girls here by that name. You must be mistaken."

"What?" I can't believe him. I remember it plain as day—Nicky and I were brought to Stonewall a month apart. I was admitted because I was depressed and had lost my appetite. My mother was worried about me. My father was gone. Nichole was admitted because, because—

"I can't remember," I say aloud, my voice distraught.

"Can't remember what?"

"I can't remember why Nicky...never mind."

I don't trust Dr. Rutilus, no matter how handsome he is. Then, as if he can read my thoughts, he smiles and says in his lovely accent,

"Dear Annie, why don't we stay on the subject of what you saw when you were hypnotized, all right?"

"Ah, all right." It takes little coaxing from him to get me to talk. I give him just about every detail I can of the dream, from waking up in the room, to nearly going crazy for eighteen days, to the cadaver table and the torture from Dr. Scythe. Dr. Rutilus writes it all down, but between my pauses he keeps writing, and I imagine it's his analysis. I don't like having my every word judged, but what can I do? I'm sick.

For some reason I can't explain, I leave out the part about the dog crying behind the door. Dr. Rutilus doesn't need to know about that.

When I finish, he clicks his pen off and checks the gold watch. "Right. Well my dear, our session is over. Let me call someone to escort you back to your room."

My room is 308. We are on the fourth floor of the asylum.

"I think I can get there on my own," I tell him. He closes his mouth and shakes his head. Behind him, on the wall, is a poster of the renowned psychologist, Doctor Freud. Dr. Rutilus reaches out, puts one hand on my shoulder. He leaves it there for just a second longer than what is comfortable, acceptable. My skin crawls. Perhaps it's from the nightmare.

"I don't think we can allow that," he says. He walks over to his desk and presses a button, resulting in a buzz. "Nurse Reynolds? Hello, we're all done for today."

The door behind me unlocks and a pleasant-looking woman opens the door. She's wearing a white uniform dress and a nurse's cap. The memory of the deformed nurse, lurching and popping, flashes in my head and I put both hands against my temples. Nurse Reynolds has long red hair and fair skin, a broad smile with white teeth and a fairy-like nose. She comes over to help me up from the couch but I stand on my own.

"Ready, dear?" she asks. I nod and head with her towards the door. Just as I'm about to walk out, I turn my head to glance back at Dr. Rutilus, and I think I see a bit of red flashing off his glasses, but it was just the setting sun shining through the window.


	4. Day and Night at Stonewall

_(Author's Note: Disclaimer—this chapter may make you not want to take a shower any time soon. It had that effect on me, hehe.)_

Memory 3

Nurse Reynolds leads me gently by the arm down the hallway. Her red hair swishes back and forth as she strides on her pumps. Ahead of us is an elderly man being pushed by a very plump nurse. Wheelchair bound, he is bent over, arms resting on his legs and arthritic hands curled into tiny claws. I can see that he is missing three fingers on his right hand. His nurse pushes him along, her giant breasts bouncing like two basketballs in her shirt with each quick and heavy step.

"Afternoon, Veronica," greets nurse Reynolds as they roll by. "And how's Henry doing today?"

"I kilt' seventy-six people in the war," Henry shouts in reply, tilting his wrinkled head to look back at us with keen little eyes. Weasel eyes. His voice is shaky and forlorn. "Seventy-six, 'cludin a woman. She were with child," he confessed.

Intrigued by his delirious confession, I crane my head round to look back at him while we continue walking. Nurse Veronica was trying to shush him, but he leans over the side of his wheelchair and raises his voice to a holler.

"They ran her body over when we finished clearin' out that gook town. Her belly near popped like a fucking cherry, all that red runnin' out 'tween her legs. God forgive me, forgive me, forgive me…" His voice trails away as we round a corner. I can hear Nurse Veronica going "Shhhh!" and clucking silences at him like a hen, but there is no need, he is sobbing and babbling incoherently now.

_An old man's voice in the dark, soft and shaking and sad. He weeps. He pleads for forgiveness somewhere behind the door that I am pressing my ear against._

Cold sweat leaks out of me. I can feel beads of it trickling down my back. The old man had sounded just like Henry. The nurse swipes a card key hanging around her neck and we wait just a few seconds before an elevator dings and we enter.

"That guy always wail like that?" I ask the nurse, hoping the jest in my voice will distract her from my paleness.

Nurse Reynolds turns her head owlishly, and beams at me with her perfect white teeth. Well, almost perfect. Her canines are a bit long, a bit too pointed.

"I'm afraid Henry always talks about the war. He can't control what he says most of the time, poor dear." She clasps her hands behind her back, waiting.

The elevator is much like a hospital elevator; big enough to fit patients in wheelchairs and gurneys. The walls of it are metallic and shiny. I try not to look at our reflections. Standing next to her is so awkward—she in her pristine uniform, me in my…what am I wearing, anyway? I look down. Today I have dressed myself in a black tank top and blue jeans, the kind that tighten around the ankles. There's a name for these. Skinny jeans. That's right. Why couldn't I remember that at first? They are such a fad at my high school. Even the dudes are wearing them, but we had another name for those. Balls pants, for anatomical reasons that need not be explained further.

An image of a boy wavers in my head, then becomes clear. Sam, my boyfriend, with his longish brown hair and that silly hipster ski cap his mom picks on him for. He should be visiting me sometime soon, but he's busy with his work and school. He helps with a doggy day care and volunteers the nice ones as therapy dogs. Thinking about him brings a crooked smile to my face. In the mirror I watch myself, my plain-Jane white-girl face, individual only through the smatters of freckles, perhaps, but then again lots of girls had freckles, too. My eyes are nothing special, either, just brown. My hair is the same color as my eyes, parted down the middle, and shoulder-length. It has a crimson tint to it that is fading around the roots, a dye job I had done right before I was committed here. It looks like I had a couple layers once, but those are just about grown out.

"This elevator is taking forever," I say, turning to look at Nurse Reynolds. We were only going to the next floor down, how long did it take?

She does not look at me as she says, "These elevators can be a little finicky." Just as she finishes speaking, the elevator stops and the doors ding. I turn and catch a glimpse of something gray and white, slouched and deformed, and I gasp, whipping my head to stare at Nurse Reynolds.

"What is it?" she asks, her emerald eyes glistening under the fluorescent lights.

"N-nothing." I stare at the floor, trying to calm myself. I'm just seeing things. Dr. Rutilus hypnotized me with his watch, and I had a vivid nightmare or day-terror, whatever, and it's just haunting me. In a couple days I'll forget about it, right?

We walk past other patient rooms until I get to my own. There are two beds in my room, but I don't have a roommate. I met the girl who used to stay in here once. She was a shy, African-American girl who really liked plants. Her entire bed stand was covered with plastic flower pots and green, leafy things, I had no idea what their names were. When she killed herself, they figured it must have taken her years to save up enough hair to make the noose. She had hidden parts of it in the soil of her pots.

Her half of the room is empty now, not even any sheets on the mattress. I don't know what they did with her plants. Probably just threw them out and left them to rot in the dumpster. She had no family to come and collect them, and really, they were just plants, but they were _her_ plants, her precious things. There were many patients like that here, teens whose families couldn't deal and sent their children here. I am one of the anomalies, I guess, because it was my mother who sent me here out of general concern. I've been here a while now. When I try to recall her face, it's a bit blurrier than Sam's.

"Be back in half an hour." Nurse Reynolds leaves me and heads to the right, toward where they prepare the medicine. I sit on my bed and lift a picture of Sam off my bed stand. His picture is my only decoration on the bed stand. In it, he is grinning and holding up one of his puppies, Ghost. Ghost is an Australian shepherd with eerie blue eyes.

Sam's eyebrow is pierced. I bring my hand up to my eyebrow and touch my own piercing there—a little silver hoop. Sam got the opposite eyebrow done, and we had gone to the parlor together. He had held my hand when my piercer lowered the needle, and it was Sam's hand I had squeezed when the sharp sting came. His hazel eyes that I had looked into, and felt some electric buzz there.

I just want to forget about the nightmare. I want to pretend it didn't happen. Inside my night stand drawer is a copy of _The Secret of N.I.M.H._, one of my favorite books from my childhood. I open the drawer and take it out, reading. I'm at the part when Mrs. Frisby, a mouse, learns that the mysterious rats living nearby used to be simple-minded creatures, living fearful and wild lives on the streets, before they were caught by the National Institution of Mental Health for experiments. Injected with an intelligence-building serum, the rats became smart, learning to read and speak and think for themselves. They were eventually freed with the help of Mrs. Frisby's husband, also a mouse. It was knowledge of their predicament that had ultimately saved them from their tormentors: the humans working at N.I.M.H.

Nurse Reynolds returns with a tray and Dixie cups full of pills. She hands me a glass of water and I set down my book, downing the pills in one gulp and chasing them with the water.

"Reading kid's books again?" she asks.

"Sometimes they're the best kind," I tell her. "They're simple and easy to understand."

The nurse takes my empty cup and glass of water. "True, but still, they're just silly children's stories." Her comment hurts me more than it should as she closes the door behind her. Whatever, she probably reads vampire love novels and wishes she was some possessive, undead dude's trophy wife. I'm suddenly tired of reading and after a few minutes of lying on my bed, thinking about Sam and blocking out the bad dream, I undress, wrap an orange towel around myself, and head for the showers with flip-flops flapping about my feet and a shower caddy swinging from my right hand. I'm in an all-girl's wing, so I don't have to feel too self-conscious about walking around in a towel. If I ever graduate high school, it'll prepare me for college dorm life at least.

It's an odd time of night for a shower and no one else is here. The showers are just separate stalls with curtains, with a little changing room with benches in front of the shower. I've only got twenty minutes or so before they announce curfew and I have to be in my room for roll call.

I step into the changing area and pull the curtain across the opening, then hang up my towel and turn the shower dial. The pipe sputters once or twice before the water comes out, and I think it odd because it's never done that before. I forget about it; the warm water is soothing and I can feel my muscles relaxing. I had no idea how tense they'd been. I pick up my shampoo bottle.

The lights go out and the bottle slips from my hands and plunks against the floor. The shower water is still streaming out, drumming loudly against the plastic bottle at my feet. Then, the water suddenly changes to scorching hot.

"SHIT!" I shriek, and dart out of the shower. I grope around for my towel, goose-bumps breaking out all over my skin. _Don't be silly_, I tell myself. _You're just letting the nightmare get to you._ My fingers find my towel and I wrap it around myself. In my haste to get out of the shower, I've lost my flip-flops. I turn around to go back for them and something bristly bumps against my nose and lips. Whatever it is, it's hanging from the ceiling and it wasn't there before.

A sinking feeling in my stomach, I reach out and grab at the thing. My fingers curl around some kind of crude rope, and I cup my hand, tracing its oval shape which connects to a single thick—

Knot. A noose. A noose made of wiry hair. Before I can scream, a loud, screeching noise reverberates off the walls. The ground vibrates just a bit.

_What the fuck is that?_ I back away from the noose, spinning around when my back sticks to the curtain. I linger just behind it, listening. The noise happens again and I flinch, half-crouching with fear.

_Get out of the showers get out of the showers get out of the showers._

Climbing up onto the bench, I search for the source of the sound. All I can see are the dim outlines of the other shower stalls and a white, phantom light shining from the hallway.

_Must have some kind of generator_. _That's why some lights are on and some are off. Just a power outage, nothing to worry about. And the sound was probably faulty pipe—_

There it is again, the long, harsh screech of metal on metal. It sounds like it's being dragged. It also sounds a bit louder, like it's coming closer. I collapse onto the bench, cowering, my knees drawn up to my face and my towel crumpled about me. My bladder suddenly feels the need to let go but I subconsciously hold it in.

_Oh God what do I do?_

The thing drags again and screeches, and this time the floor practically hums from the vibration. Whatever it is, it's in here with me now.

I strain to hear something, anything, but the shower is still going, hissing and dripping. Wait, was that…breathing? No, it had to be a rush of air through the room, not a deep, hollow breath.

But it happens again, and I know I have two choices: I can either face it and try to run past it, or hide in the shower and hope it passes by me. Swallowing, I tuck my towel around me as tight as I can and slide the curtain aside. The entrance to the showers bends at a right angle, and there is nothing there. But there could be something around the bend, and the noise and the ground tremors tell me there is.

I linger behind the curtain, torn in two directions, fight or flight.

Someone or something makes my decision for me, because the noose lowers around my neck and I hear low, sinister giggling. I bite my lip, hard, to keep from screaming and jerk the noose back over my head just as I can feel the loop close on my hand. That tightening had been meant for my neck, I realize as I shake my hand free. Without thinking, I run past the curtain and into the hall. I run away from the stall and towards the exit, then the noise again—this time, so high-pitched and loud that I clamp my hands to my ears.

It appears from around the bend, a tall, man-shaped being with a bloodied apron and ropey muscles. It is in no way a man, because it has no human head—only a large, metal, pyramid-shaped case that sags forward slightly. The screeching noise is a giant knife that it has been dragging, bigger than any blade I have ever seen. There were dark stains on this butcher's blade, and it was as my eyes beheld these that I groan. My throat cannot muster a scream.

I hear the demonic laughter again from behind. The creature in front of me steps forward, the apron swooshing over heavy black boots. It WAS breathing, slow and heavy.

_A butcher, come to slay the swine_, I think, and in my predicament I do not notice the strangeness of that thought.

The creature is coming toward me, and soon it will be out of the light and in the dark with me and the laughter. I break into a jog, hoping that the triangular thing on its shoulders inhibits its hearing, but it knows I'm coming and raises its sword with both hands. The hallway is slim and the creature raises the knife overhead, preparing for a downward stroke that I know will split me into bloody halves, guts spilled all over the shower room floor, if it strikes.

I run towards it—him—and dive, going for the space beneath his legs. He brings the sword down with a smash, but I don't look to see the damage it has inevitably done to the bathroom floor. I only have eyes for the exit, for the light. I start towards it, but am jerked back for a split second as the creature's hand latches on to my towel. I've misjudged the spacing of the room; he had enough to turn and grab at me.

Pivoting, I can see his arm, the tendons straining, the rounded shoulder, latticed with veins, and the faceless shape of his massive head, and my lungs find enough air to scream.

"LET GO!"

I use my legs to push against his pull, and the towel tears free, like tissue paper, despite the fact that it is pinned by both of my arms. Some instinctive part of me knows that this man-creature could tear my skin right from my body, and so I don't look back as I flee into the hallway.


	5. In Search of Food

(Author's Note: I have made some adaptations to the layout of Silent Hill, including street names and building locations. I did this, not to be lazy, but because I think it would be interesting if the layout of the town changed according to the individuals who visit. After all, Silent Hill adapts its monsters to the fears of the individuals, why not the rest of the town?)

* * *

Day 2: Scavenging

_That's enough writing for now. I've got to take a break and get some sleep, or I'll never make it out tomorrow to find food. Kodiak is snoring, it doesn't take him long to fall asleep. It takes me forever._

_-Nimh_

Nimh awoke to gray light filtering through the dirty window of the room. The remains of last night's fire were blackened lumps in a hole in the floor. Bits of brick and cement lined the tiny fire pit to keep it from catching on the broken planks of wood she had to chop through. It was only safe to have a fire inside out-of-the-way places like this, and there were just enough holes in the ceiling for the smoke to travel through unnoticed. A severely rusted wood axe was propped against the plywood wall.

Kodiak was already up and about, padding around the small shed and pausing every now and then to listen.

"Morning, Kodi. Hungry?" she asked, stretching and kicking aside the moth-eaten comforter she had slept with. Dust flew up from the blanket as she did so. She pulled on her black boots, coughing. The dog trotted over, grateful to receive a scratch behind the ears. Nimh rubbed at a spot on her back where it ached from sleeping on the hard floor.

"Let's see what we can find, then, hmm?" she said, her voice scratched with fatigue. She yawned once before standing up.

She strapped the shotgun to her back and tucked the handgun into the waistband of her jeans. There was an empty burlap grass seed bag on the floor. She lifted this and draped it over her shoulder, walked over to the door, paused with her hand on the handle. Kodi looked up at her, titling his head in the way of canines when they're curious about something.

Nimh opened the door, which creaked on its hinges, and stepped outside. They stood in a fenced-in backyard and had to go through an abandoned house to leave. Nimh crossed the lawn, Kodi trotting close by, and opened the screen door leading inside the two-story Victorian. She had already raided it for food. With Kodi's nose to help, they usually could clear a house or building in no time. This former dwelling had offered some dried packets of Ramen and a mostly-empty can of peanuts in it.

They crossed a kitchen and went down a hallway. To the left was a living room with a smashed grandfather clock, and to the right was a study where books had fallen off the shelves and lay in heaps on the floor. Nimh opened the front door and stepped out onto the street.

She had a clear distance of about twenty feet or so. The rest was hidden in great walls of thick, supernatural mist. They had come from the northern side of the town, and had cleared all the houses on the street, Leonard Avenue, of food. She hated the thought of exploring, opening herself and Kodi up to new threats, but her stomach was grinding on itself and she knew Kodi's was the same.

"All right," she said, to no one in particular. She slid the shotgun from her shoulder and held it at her side, then proceeded towards the fog. When she had first fled the asylum, the shifting fog had been disorienting and had nearly cost her and Kodi their lives on several occasions. She intended to log that event into her journal, as well, but for now her priority was food.

Kodi bounded ahead, lifting his head now and then to sniff at the air, listening. Nimh had a vague outline of the town in her head from the streets she had already traveled on to get to where she was, but much of the southern half of the town was unknown. Soon, they would be reaching the intersection of Leonard Avenue and Hedge Street, which led south.

Something clattered to her right and she spun. Kodi ran after the noise, barking. Nimh brought the gun up and sighted along the muzzle. Kodi had vanished into the fog and was barking at something. No sign of activity, and then a gray blur shot by along the ground and Nimh swiveled her gun to match its path. Her finger nearly pressed on the trigger before she realized it was just a cat. She lowered the gun and sighed.

Kodi reappeared and padded over to her. "Good boy," she praised while petting him. "Let's keep an eye out for things a bit more threatening than cats, huh?"

The dog whined and darted away, looking back over his shoulder at her. She knew he wanted her to follow, and so she did, jogging after him. He led her to an overturned garbage can, and inside it was a bag of unopened corn chips. She picked it up and looked at the expiration date: September 1978. She couldn't remember what year it was, or when she had been committed to Stonewall, or when her plane had crashed, if she had even gotten here by plane. Nothing was certain, and only survival mattered.

She took out a pocket knife from her coat pocket and cut into the bag. A powdery dust exploded everywhere, falling to the cement. She let the bag flutter to the ground where Kodi sniffed it a few times, then looked up at her. Her stomach protested loudly.

"Aw, it's ok Kodi. I appreciate the effort." Nimh smiled and patted him again, then turned around. She knew in the pit of her stomach that she had to go south. Nothing was ever easy in this place.

Kodi would not follow her. She stooped down and beckoned him, waving her hand and whistling.

"Come on, boy! It's ok. We're going to be ok. We won't go far."

The dog ignored her and trotted back and forth, sniffing the ground here and there. Nimh began to get annoyed. They only had a certain amount of "safe time" before the darkness fell, and they would be screwed if that happened when they were far from the shed.

"Kodiak, COME!" She jabbed her finger at the spot before her. It was no use. He was obviously not in a listening mood.

She sighed heavily, muttered "Goddamn it" and headed down Hedge Street. As its name implied, the buildings here were flanked by waist-high hedges that looked like they had been green in some forgotten time, but now their leaves were a muddy camouflage color. The ever-present ash coated the hedges in a layer of an inch or so. There were stores on this street, their awnings torn or faded and their windows soaped over or broken. Already she missed Kodi, and she looked back for him several times. He would turn up in a minute or two. He always did.

She read the names of the store aloud to break the silence.

"Nathan's Drugs."

"George's Auto Parts: We Got What You Need."

"World-Famous Fashion Wears."

"Big Joe's Burger Shack." She halted at this and examined the building. There as a long yellow awning and two windows, the one with a faded cartoon hamburger on it dancing with a milkshake. The large white eyes of each character had lost their pupils, giving them crazed expressions.

"Creepy," said Nimh aloud. "Food that I'm about to eat should not be that happy."

The door to Joe's was locked. She used the butt of the gun to bust in the front door, the glass tinkling to the ground. The hole was big enough for her to stoop through, so she did, instead of reaching in and unlocking the door. She didn't like the idea of her hand being vulnerable while she fingered at a lock in the dark.

Once inside the store, she dug in the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out a white Bic lighter. She flicked it on and held it aloft, walking around, surveying the tables, the scattered chairs, the register, the counter, and the kitchen behind it. It was a one-roomed joint, probably a place where the local teens had gone for milkshakes and other social gatherings like that, things she had once thought boring and tacky and things that she now missed dearly.

What she needed was a storage pantry. She put her rear end on the counter and swerved her legs over to the other side, sliding off it and into the kitchen. Her firelight winked off the metal counters and was swallowed by the blackened holes of the stove burners. There was a deep fryer to her right and to her left…

Bingo. She made a b-line for a door marked "Supplies" and grasped the handle. It resisted her turns.

"Fuck. Of course it would be locked. _Everything_ in this shit town is locked." She looked around for a light switch and found one right next to the closet. She expected it to not work but, lo and behold, the long, fluorescent lights above clicked on and buzzed. The hum of electricity was music to her ears, and for a few seconds she stood, just taking it in. Then she shook her head and tucked the lighter back into her pocket.

She grabbed a pot off the counter and brought it down against the doorknob with all her strength. Wham! The knob fell to the floor with a clink and rolled under the stove in an offended manner.

"Sorry Joe," Nimh smirked. She kicked the door in and aimed her gun into the dark of the closet. Nothing stirred. She groped for a switch and flicked it. No light. She brought the lighter back out and walked inside. The shelves were lined with spare fryer baskets, spatulas, and all sorts of cooking materials she had seen before and had no use of. It was then she spied something VERY useful.

"No way," she breathed, her eyes lingering on some small cans with circular tabs on the top. She reached down and picked one up. It was a can of petroleum jelly, the pink kind used to heat fondue pots. And sure enough, there were fondue pots on the shelf above, along with a box of matches. She loaded the sack full of the petroleum cans and put the matches in her empty back pocket, pleased with her find.

Toward the back of the closet she found jars and jars of pickles, sweet peppers, olives, onions, and seasonings. Beneath these shelves were stuffed sacks of potatoes.

She grabbed three or four of these jars and added them to the sack. She set the bundle on the floor and brought out her knife, cutting into an unopened bag of potatoes. She was greeted with a horrid smell of rotten produce. She tried another potato sack, and another, and another. All rotten. When she was about to cut into the last one, something brushed against her legs and she jumped.

"JESUS!" she yelled, reaching for the handgun and stopping herself when she saw that Kodiak had returned. He sat there panting, ignoring the look of surprise and disgust on her face.

"And where have YOU been, doggy?"

Kodiak smiled and wagged his tail. Nimh took a couple deep breaths and opened the last sack. This one, from some divine intervention or biological resistance to decay, had preserved. Her bag was now halfway full of condiment jars, petroleum cans, and potatoes.

"All I need now are some burgers and we can have ourselves a picnic," said Nimh. Kodi licked his lips.

When she left the closet, the lights in the burger joint flickered and died. The air filled with a soundless vibration. There was a sinister energy she was all-too familiar with. The pipes in the building seemed to be clanking and groaning in the walls at all once, as if the building were expanding. Or shrinking.

"Kodi," she whispered, trying not to sound panicked as she twisted the opening of the sack shut and retrieved the handgun from her waistband. "Get ready."

A radio on the countertop turned on, despite being unplugged, and the air was filled with ear-splitting static. Kodiak whined. He hated the static and she had seen all the hairs on his furry body stand up from it. Now, however, she saw nothing.

Nimh realized she needed a hand to click the lighter on, and so she put her gun back in the waistband and took out the lighter. Hand shaking, she flicked the wheel several times before the flame hissed to life.


	6. Shots in the Dark

Day 2: Shots in the Dark

Nimh's hand shook as the lighter clicked on, the flame bubbling a dim orange light around them. There was no glitter of firelight in the kitchen, for everything had gone dull and rusted and black. The cookery hanging reminded her of dead animals strewn up for draining. The radio still buzzed and chattered like an angry swarm of bees. Taking it one step at a time, Nimh made her way toward the front of the restaurant. Kodi's nails clicked on the dirty tiles and his fur was bristling.

Inwardly, Nimh cursed herself for leaving Leonard Avenue. She had brought the darkness upon them and now their lives were at risk.

The sack made it slow going, and she pulled it along, a thief who had misjudged her cache. Her thumb burned from holding down the lighter for so long. She hardly noticed. She lifted the counter hatch and winced when it squeaked on its hinges. The sound rang in her ears afterwards and she shook her head to try and get it out.

She could not see outside, to the street. Kodi went ahead of her, stuck his muzzle out the broken door and sniffed the air. Then he hopped over the broken ridge of glass and onto the sidewalk. Nimh followed, lifting the sack carefully out of the restaurant, lest she snag it on a jagged tooth of glass.

Kodi lowered his head and growled, the sound reverberating in his deep chest cavity. His ears were clamped tight against his long skull and his fangs were fully exposed and white.

She disabled the safety on the handgun and sighted down it, holding it out at arm's length. She squinted to see through the falling ash, brushing some away from her eyes with her sleeve. Leaning all her weight on one leg, she spread her feet apart and braced herself.

There was a small but rapid pattering coming from the mist. The feet of hundreds of mice running through the walls in the barn. No, she knew it wasn't mice, wasn't even in the same REALM as mice, and she felt the gun grow slick against her hands. She had just enough time to wipe her palms against her jeans when it appeared.

The insect crawled into view, its innumerable legs working one after the other like a centipede's. Only this was no insect the likes of mankind had ever seen. It was like something out of prehistoric times when nature's configurations were larger, more primitive, and much more brutal. Its body was a putrid yellow and see-through in places, including the long antennae and the legs, which were many and thin. It had two large red eyes and was so close that Nimh could see her warped reflection in the fiery orbs. Two great, needle-shaped pincers swept hungrily back and forth toward the eager mouth. The pincers dripped with black venom that fell, hissing, to the ground.

It was the size of a small car. In her head, Nimh thought _Devourer_.

"Kodi, get back!" The dog listened for once and retreated to her side just in time.

The insect lunged forward and Nimh shot several times at its head, missed by a foot. Two legs as thick as her own thigh flew into the air. The monster slithered out of sight unexpectedly. Nimh waved the lighter back and forth, searching frantically. The Devourer's legs lay twitching on the ground; ash spilled from the sky and the world was nothing but white, gray and orange.

Her frantic waving caused the flame to go out. The lighter slid through her clammy fingers and clattered to the ground. All went black.

"Shit, oh, shit, oh, fuck me." She whimpered and fell to her hands and knees, feeling around for the lighter. She heard Kodi snarl and the clack of the thing's pincers near her ear. Her hand felt something hard and plastic. She flicked the lighter on just as the Devourer reappeared on her right, looming over her.

Kodi had leaped on top the thing's skeletal back and had latched on to one of its giant eyes. The Devourer bucked and twisted, rising to a height of eight or nine feet and its front-most legs lashing, clawing for purchase.

_Now! Kill it now!_ her voice urged inside her mind.

She held the lighter up and saw her only friend hanging on by his teeth, his jaws locked onto the eye. The Devourer was soundless throughout it all, and when she, grim-faced and stolid, took aim and fired again the gunshots exploded in the dark.

The Devourer thrashed and whipped in pain. It shook Kodiak about like an accessory. From her spot in the street, Nimh watched the creature plummet toward the ground and, wide-eyed, saw that the precious supply bag was in its wake.

Her mouth opened wide as the dying insect fell, once and for all, with a thud. "NO!" It was useless. Their supplies were ruined, crushed under the dead weight of the creature. Kodiak finally let go and got up on all fours, mouth open and chest heaving.

"Kodi!" Nimh sobbed and beckoned, lowering her gun. The dog approached her, quivering, his jaws slavered with the thing's congealed eye juice. She wanted to fall to her knees and stroke him until they were both calm again, but she knew where there was one Devourer there would surely be more. Their supplies were crushed and she was hungrier than ever.

She held her face in one hand and sobbed again.

"Sam. Oh, Sam. God, I wish you were here."

The dog whined and licked her tear-stained fingers. He let out a low _woof_ several times. Nimh knew he was afraid of Others. They would smell the dead, acrid fluids now leaking from the body. And they would be hungry for more than just one of their own, she was damn sure of that.

Sniffling, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and shivered, hugging herself. The shed. They had to get back to the shed, where she could think clearly. Living on what little the town had to offer was getting them nowhere; she knew this deep down.

"Come on," she told him, and walked off toward Leonard Avenue. Her pace quickened drastically when she heard a pattering commotion from behind. No. No, no, no. The noise was becoming too loud too quickly. They would overtake her and Kodi.

Kodiak barked and bounded ahead of her. She broke into a run. "Wait up!" The dog did not heed her calls. She followed the tinkle of his collar and ended up in an alley, but it was a dead end. A fence blocked the rest of the way. There was a cat-sized hole in the bottom that Kodi had squeezed through, and now he stood on the other side of the fence, waiting for her.

She didn't have time to find a way around. The Devourers were coming, their many legs now a chorus of clicking and scratching. Far off, but not far enough, she could hear them starting on the corpse—savage, crunching noises punctuated by slurps and hisses. They could gobble one of their own in less than a minute, and a full-grown man in half that time. She knew, because she had seen it personally.

The fence wiggled under her weight as she scrambled up it, shoving her boots into the chain link as far as she could. Muscles aching, she swung her body over the top just as a pair of long antennae came searching, smelling, around the bend and into the alley.

Her thighs and shoulders were throbbing, but she ran anyway. They bolted down an unknown street until they came to an intersection. Nimh had just enough sense to glimpse the street sign—Cobalt Street—before they heard a commotion from the alley and fled onto Leonard Avenue.

Boots pounded up the porch steps and the screen door to the house swung open. Nimh turned and locked the front door, then ran toward the back. She had an absurd impulse to check the kitchen, even though she KNEW there was no food, there never would be, and resisted the urge to open the drawers. Kodi pawed at the back door as she opened it, and together they crossed the yard and she barricaded them inside the shed.

Nimh slid down to the floor, curling into a ball.

"I can't do this. I can't. Got to, get, out..."

Her words tapered off into gusty sobs. She wept into her arm while Kodi propped both front paws on the window, staring, staring, out into the fog from whence they came.


	7. Cornered

Memory 4: Cornered

She hovered the pen over the open composition book, hesitant to begin. She had built a small fire like the one last night—enough to write by, nothing more.

_I have to get my story straight before I can go on_, she thought. It was easier said than done, especially when her real memories and illusions were mingling in a kind of twisted dance.

She scratched Kodi under his chin and tapped the pen against the paper. She reached into her pocket and took out a small, pink loop that was stained with wear. It was her Stonewall medical bracelet.

Her life before Silent Hill was there, in the back of her head, waiting for her to discover it. And the deceptions were there, too.

_All right. I don't have much time. Here goes._

Turning the medical bracelet over and over in her free hand, she began to write.

* * *

_How can I pretend that I don't see_

_what you hide so carelessly?_

_I saw her bleed;_

_You heard me breathe_

_And I froze inside myself and turned away_

_I must be dreaming_

I run down the hallway, half-crazed with fear and struggling to hold on to my wits. The walls are coated in red rust and the floors are broken and cracked. Shards of the floor poke at the tender areas of my feet.

Clothes. I needed clothes and shoes. I run in spurts toward my room, stopping to back against the wall several times, fighting waves of fear. The hospital air is cold against my bare skin and I shiver. I cover my chest as best as I can with my arms. My wet hair drips on the floor as I bolt towards my door.

The door won't open, but it doesn't make any sense. There are no locks on patient doors. I bang on the door with my fist and push. Then, I hear the laughter again—the catty titter of a teenage girl.

"LET ME IN!"

I throw my weight against the door.

"Open up!"

"Are you _sure_?"

"Yes! Fucking open the door!"

It sniggers again. "…Okay"

The door swings open and I take a cautious step inside. There's no sign or sound of anyone. I creep over to my dresser, pull open the drawers and gather some clothes. That's when he finds me. My clothes fall to the floor in a heap.

"Annie," a voice purrs darkly in my ear. I fight him, twisting and kicking. My captor's arms are two iron bars wrapped around my chest, crushing the air out of my lungs. There is no passion in his grip, only malice.

Lips press against my ear. Hot breath there, where my cartilage is pierced. "Annie Starr. My little starlet." His tongue forks out and licks at my earlobe. Something like a hand, but far more snakelike, sliding down toward the space between my legs. His contact disgusts me and I want to retch.

"Get off!" I scream and thrash my head backwards. The back of my skull connects with a face and something cracks. A snarl of pain. I am shoved onto the bed, pinned down from behind.

"You little bitch!" he spits. In the lightless void of the glass window, I see two pinpoints of red. My brain is throbbing from the blow I dealt him. Blood runs down my neck; something has cut the back of my head. I feel a hand pushing down on the base of my spine and a knee parting my legs. My entire, pathetic existence seems to be draining out of the hole in my skull, numbing me. I hear the ticking of a clock between my tormentor's gusty breaths. Time is mocking me.

_We all live_

_We all die_

_That does not begin to justify you_

He presses his pelvis against me and I feel his body quake. Worms undulate in my stomach; my head spins.

"Don't," I mumble stupidly, as if my words will have an effect. No, not words. My foot kicks out and slams into his throbbing manhood, and I hear the breath collapse from his lungs. I shove backwards and he yields with a grunt. I spin around and bolt for the door.

A harsh screech sounds out. In the hallway, the man-creature with the red triangle helmet is coming. He's wielding his knife. To my left is a dead end; to my right is the demon. I turn around and before me is Dr. Scythe, his left goggle cracked and his neat rows of tiny milk teeth beaming at me.

"It's either me or the creature, Annie. And I promise you, he'll be much more _savage_."

"Fuck you!" I spit at him. "Why are you doing this?"

Tick, tick, tick. The clock is getting louder and Dr. Scythe opens his mouth to reply, but I can't hear him. I clamp my hands to my head, trying to squeeze the noise out. If it gets any louder, I'm going to go crazy, if I haven't done so already.

_It's not what it seems_

_Not what you think_

_No, I must be dreaming!_

_It's only in my mind_

_Not real life_

_No, I must be dreaming!_

The monster in the hallway shudders with hollow breath and reaches into the room. I know suffering and death wait for me in his grip. I think of killing myself, surrendering to his wrath and the knife, but the drive to live is sometimes an insurmountable curse.

I slam the door shut and wait for the red eyes to come closer and take me.

* * *

Nimh stopped writing and bent over, a wave of nausea rolling in her stomach. She held her face in her hands, fingers splayed, digging her nails into her scalp.

Kodi put his head in her lap and sighed. He did not move when her tears dripped onto his muzzle. Her hand petted him, shaking and absent-minded. She found some strength through the dog, a little jewel of comfort. She picked up the pen again.

* * *

_Help, you know I've got to tell someone_

_Tell them what I know you've done_

_I fear you,_

_but spoken fears can come true_

I black out before he can finish. It's the only tatter of mercy I'm thrown throughout the ordeal. I'm left to wake up to normal daylight filtering through my window. The usually hum and bustle of nurses and a few patients in the hallway, headed for breakfast.

Nurse Reynolds comes in and nearly drops her tray of meds when she sees me lying, naked and bleeding and filth-covered, on the linoleum.

"My God!" She kneels beside me. 'What happened?"

"H-he…" I start, but choke on my own sob. She takes my hands in her own and lifts my arms. There are red gashes all along my wrists and up to my elbows, crosshatching a gruesome Jacob's ladder.

Nurse Reynolds pulls a radio out of her pocket. "I need medical staff in room 308! We have attempted suicide—"

"No," I say through the haze of pain and shock. "N-not su-suicide…"

"Okay," she says dismissively. She doesn't believe me. How can she? I am slipping into these nightmares and now I'm waking up with the after-effects. Or maybe I really am crazy and doing this to myself.

The medical staff rushes in and applies pressure to my wounds. They staunch the bleeding and examine my body, right there in the room. Some curious patients are crowding around my door, and a big, African-American male orderly blocks them off.

"Go on, shoo!" he hollers. "Git outta here." He cranes his bald head into the hallway. "Yo! Someone remove these patients from the hallway, NOW!"

They lift me onto a gurney and carry me off to the medical ward. I babbled about the red-eyed doctor and the monster while they examined every inch of me. Someone wrote what I was saying down along with the medical report. No one thought to get a rape kit, and by the time I washed myself in the shower (in front of a female nurse) the evidence swirled down the drain, swished through the pipes and traveled to depths even I do not know of.

* * *

(A/N: The song in this chapter is "Bleed" by Evanescence. I did not write and nor do I own that song.)


	8. Meeting Sam

Memory 5: Meeting Sam

I spent the next few days in recovery, lying on a bed in the hospital ward. I was traumatized, but no one seemed to notice or give a shit. The nurses that monitored me 24/7 only made sure that I did not try to kill myself again, although at that point, I would have gladly accepted death. On that bed, in my dazed stupor, I stared out at the world through empty eyes. Everything I knew was undone. Life had turned upside down, was crashing, and was taking me with it. Yet some small part of me still fought against the rising tide of insanity threatening to overtake me.

That part of me was the part that loved Sam. I focused on my memories of him in the ward, his voice drained out the medical clicks and beeps and his face blocked the mechanical proceedings of each day, giving me life again. We both went to Rochester High School, but that wasn't how we had met. I was only in high school for two years when I was sent to Stonewall.

Before Stonewall, I hadn't been eating and my moods had been lower than the gutters I walked by each day to school. I wasn't going to soccer practice and my grades were pathetic; I stopped caring about school. My mother, whose face still escapes me every time I tried to picture it, had asked me what was wrong. I didn't know, never had any answers for her. I just felt like I was fading away, a ghost lost in the ebb and flow of my peers, nowhere to go and nothing to do with myself. When I began to lose weight and suffer bouts of insomnia, my mother couldn't bear it. She said I needed help, and that her friend had recommended Stonewall for me.

What came after is a smudge in my memory. A big one. I can't remember most of my time there, even as I'm writing this. But I know something had to have happened, because I'm no longer in the real world. Something went wrong at Stonewall and launched me into this nightmare world—I am searching for the bridge between, where the delusions end and reality begins. I think it has something to do with my treatment, or my condition, whatever it was. There is so much I don't know about myself; if I wasn't in such a hellish place, I might be able to think clearer.

I met Sam when he brought this therapy dog, Jasmine, in to see the patients. I had been sitting around in the common room, ignoring the TV and the board games some of the other patients were playing. I didn't concern myself with them—not sure why, but I just hadn't been the talkative type. He came in with a group of people from some pet therapy agency, maybe it was some church organization, I don't know. I do know that I loved dogs. Jasmine was a golden retriever and lab mix, who had bounded over to me and put her massive head in my lap.

My heart fluttered with joy at the sight of an animal, it had been so long since I had seen one. I scratched her ears and rubbed her belly when she rolled over. She wagged her bushy tail and got up, bringing me a rubber ball to play fetch with. They let us go outside and I tossed the ball to her, over and over. After a while, I noticed a boy my age watching me. He was tall, thin but muscular, in a T-shirt and jeans and a ski cap hanging off the back of his head. He had long, dark hair that he brushed out of his pale face and, when he walked over to pet Jasmine, I noticed that he had the most dazzling green eyes.

"Hey," he said, while still patting Jasmine. "Haven't I seen you before?"

I didn't answer him at first, turning away slightly. A boy hadn't talked to me in so long…it was like an alien had dropped out of a UFO to have a conversation.

"Um, I don't think so," I managed to say. He smiled at me, a happy, crooked smile—teeth were straight, white, but something about his jaw gave him a jaunty grin. It drew me in and made my heart flutter despite myself.

"Yeah, don't you go to Rochester?" he asked, then realized he'd made a mistake. "Er, _went_ to Rochester?"

I nodded. "Yeah." Great, now he knew I was a head case. I shoved my hands in my pockets and dug at the dirt with the toe of my sneaker.

Jasmine wove between his long legs and he focused on her to avoid the awkward silence. Then he said, "My name's Sam. Sam Bernhardt. And this lump of drooling fur at my feet is Jasmine."

"Nice to meet you," I chuckled, kneeling down to pet Jasmine again. "And you," I added, glancing up at Sam for a second. I did not use my hand with the pink bracelet to pet Jasmine, even though it was my right hand and dominant.

I opened my mouth. "My name's—"

And that part of my memory cuts off. The rest of my time with Sam comes and goes in flashes. I remember he came to visit me during the daytime only once more, walking across the lawns, Jasmine bounding at our feet and chasing squirrels. Sunlight everywhere, dazzling and bright. After that, for some reason, all my memories of him are at night. I think I must have snuck out of my room to meet him. There is a clacking noise associated with this memory—a rock tapping against glass.

In the medical ward, Dr. Rutilus came to visit me on the third day. He pulled up a chair and I glared at him balefully.

"Hello Annie," he greeted. He did not have his clipboard with him, only a thin leather briefcase. He wasn't offended when I did not reply. His calmness aggravated me, even, and I just wanted him gone. But, at the same time, I was curious to see if he could help me.

"I must tell you," he started, taking off his glasses. His eyes were so incredibly blue, I thought I was looking at two pools of cool water. "I feel it is my fault for what happened. Hypnosis can be a wonderful tool for healing and self-discovery, but it also has its negative effects. I feel responsible, Annie, and for that I give you my sincerest apology. I am your therapist and I let you down." He clasped his hands between his knees.

"What is wrong with me?" I begged softly. That was all I wanted to know.

Dr. Rutilus shined his glasses on the sleeve of his shirt. "You're suffering extreme delusions, Annie. We've been conducting many tests—"

_A dark and raspy voice, clipped and refined, speaking in the red light. "We're going to make sure nothing is wrong. There are many tests, but we have to be thorough, now, don't we?"_

I gaped at Dr. Rutilus as the flashback from my nightmare returned.

"What's wrong, Annie? What have I said?"

"N-nothing," I lied.

"Annie, you must be truthful with me. It's the only way I can help you," he said, and there was so much sincerity in his voice that my heart dripped with guilt. I twitched in my bed. He watched me coolly from behind his glasses.

"I know the last time was unsuccessful. But if you are feeling up to it, I believe this time could be different," he said, and from his leather briefcase he took out the gold watch.

I stared at the circle of finely carved glass, glinting brilliant and yellow like the sun on its long, thin chain. A ticking whispered from within its depths, and the hairs prickled on the back of my neck.

"No," I told him flatly. "Not again. Never." I cut my hand through the air to finalize my point and drew my knees to my chest.

Dr. Rutilus sat there, face placid. I shifted again uncomfortably, but I would not let the guilt win.

"A shame," my therapist said, and gave the watch a spin with his index finger. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" His tone was conversational, even chipper.

"Yeah, I guess," I muttered, staring at my sheets.

"Annie."

"Yes?"

"Look at me."

_My Annie Starr…_

I did. I don't know why, but I obeyed. The watch swayed back and forth, a golden trail following in its wake. Left, right, left, right, left, right—slowly, slowly, back and forth. My pupils felt like they were doubling in size and my mouth fell open slightly.

"Listen to my voice, Annie. You are growing tired, so very, very tired…"

"No," I mumbled. "Not…agai—"

And then I was gone.


	9. Becoming Nimh

Chapter 9: Becoming Nimh

It happened. I was on the Other Side, the place of nightmares and the chaotic afterbirth mess of anomie. And it was the fault of Dr. Rutilus and his pendulum—that was the link between here and there, it must have been.

I was still in the hospital ward, but now the curtained beds and medical equipment were smoke-stained and torn. Most of the curtains had holes burnt through them, like someone had pitched hot coals. The floor was missing tiles in large, brownish red patches that looked like scabs on the skin of some white, scaly creature.

And there was the obscure darkness again. It ate up all the light and left only dim yellow remnants hanging from the ceiling in dirty glass orbs. _Dying fireflies_, I thought.

This time I was prepared, though no less afraid. I rose from my bed and lifted my arms, examining my palms and the fresh bandages swirling up to my elbows. Someone had hurt me, and I was beginning to think it wasn't myself—the lies the staff here kept drilling into my head. And even if these WERE delusions and I really was hurting myself, it wasn't me that was doing it. There was some force working against me and I had to give it a face, a name.

That would have to be figured out later. Right then, I knew I had to get out. Stonewall was no longer a haven for recovery, but a pit of suffering and corruption. It might be different for some others. But for me, and the girl who hanged herself with her own hair, and for countless others who sought to escape the prisons of their minds, Stonewall was just one big, cold cage.

I ran out of the ward and toward the medicine closet. It was locked, but I was getting in one way or another. I picked up a chair and smashed down on the door knob. It wouldn't break, and my arms grew sore quickly from the effort. After several attempts, I let the chair fall to the ground and stood there, gasping for air, muscles shaking and my head heavy with doubt.

Then, I heard metallic screeching and grinding—distant, but not distant enough—and came to my senses, the hairs on my arms and neck standing up. At this sound, like a resonant death knell, my mind was kindled with a flaming want to escape. I had had enough. With a wordless utterance I lifted the chair again and smashed at the door until the handle crumpled away. I almost cried with joy, but my fear wouldn't quite let me. Once inside, I threw boxes and jars on the ground, smashing glass and upsetting containers, looking for a flashlight. I found a black, metal one behind a box of tweezers.

In a long, white refrigerator I discovered a goldmine. There were glass vials of sedatives and stimulants, uppers and downers, and I grabbed handfuls of these along with some syringes. I had no knowledge of dosages and needles, but I mixed the products together and filled the syringes with the clear fluids. They weren't for me, after all. I placed safety caps on the loaded syringes and added them to my armful of things.

Across from the medicine closet was the nurses' lounge. This was unlocked, and I went in and strode past an upturned coffee table, b-lining toward the lockers. I found a nurse's uniform and changed into it with panicked urgency, hands trembling, flashlight clenched between my teeth. My arms were a dead giveaway, I had no hope of disguising myself, but it was better than the medical gown I had been wearing. I slipped ten syringes into my pockets, along with a pair of tweezers. Then I grasped the flashlight and slipped my bare feet into a pair of size-seven flat work shoes.

When I went back into the hallway, my flashlight illuminated gray, fleshy forms standing, statuesque, in the hallway.

_No, you don't_, I thought. _I'm getting the fuck out of this place whether you all move or not._

The nurses didn't twitch a muscle. I swallowed and swung my light over their hands—they were carrying scalpels and needles. There were only three nurses, but I doubted if I could run past them and not get sliced open or stabbed.

I darted back into the lounge and toward the coffee table. One of the legs was angled the wrong way and it came off with some wiggling. There was a long nail on the end of it. I couldn't believe I was actually going to do what I was about to do, but the overwhelming need to escape this madhouse fueled my actions.

I eased out into the hallway. The nurses hadn't moved, they simply stood in half-cocked as if in suspended animation. Raising my makeshift club, I stepped lightly toward them, my knees bent and my stomach wringing itself. I passed the first nurse without incident; her back was turned to me and I could not see her deformed face.

The next nurse twitched at the neck, but I kept moving, never taking my eyes off her. This was a mistake. The third nurse ahead of me slid forward, heels scraping against the floor. She made a muffled keening sound behind the wreckage of her flesh-wrapped face and slashed at my neck.

Without thinking I swung my club and, by sheer dumb luck because I had closed my eyes in terror, cracked her across the skull. The nail-end was facing outward and hadn't found its mark, and I only clipped the side of her head. But she stumbled, directly into the nurse I had been trying to walk by, who came to life and stabbed at her with a syringe.

They forgot all about me as they broke into a slashing and stabbing frenzy, each one blindly lashing out, trying to find flesh that would yield to metal and blade. Mine would have no part in it. I adjusted my grip on the club and the flashlight, and turned right just as I heard blood spatter onto the floor in thick wet drips, followed by a duller sound of something weight-laden hitting the floor.

Luckily for me, the hospital ward was on the second floor. This meant I only had one set of stairs to go down, and then it was out the front door and into the world of sane-mindedness and, if I had my way, the police.

My feet found the stairwell and ran down it, the heels of my flats tapping on the metal grids. I heard water plunking somewhere in the walls. The pipes were groaning. The building seemed to be breathing in anticipation, or maybe that was me.

I went for the door leading out of the stairwell, but it was locked. Despairing, I slammed my weight into it, but the fucking thing would not even tremble. I doubted my wooden table leg would do anything, and besides, I needed it to defend myself. I ran back up the stairs to the second floor and went for the door.

It was jammed. I shook the handle and gritted my teeth, eyes rolling in their sockets, but it was no use.

"How can that be?" I asked aloud. The water dripped and the pipes creaked and grinded, but those were my only answers. I tried the other doors on the third, fourth, and fifth floors, but these were locked or jammed as well.

I flipped and tore down the stairs, leaping two and three at a time. I came to a dead stop at the flight leading to the basement, into the dark. It was the only other way. Pointing my flashlight like a beacon, I took the steps one by one, trying very hard to quiet my breathing. My breath rattled in my lungs from running.

Stealing down the hallway, I passed doors with gridded glass windows. Curiosity got the better of me and I shined my light into one of the rooms. My light glanced off in spirals and corkscrews, the tracks of plastic and glass lab equipment. There were giant beakers and boxy metal machines whose purpose I couldn't even guess.

_Why the hell is there a lab in the basement?_

Then I heard it—a dog's helpless yip of pain. I spun around and, having learned nothing from my previous nightmares, wrenched open the door. What I saw next confounded me for a few seconds and my brain couldn't process it. I shined my beam of light into the room, but it would not illuminate anything. It was as if the darkness in the room was alive and swallowing my light.

_What the—_

There was no time to finish my thought, because a tendril of darkness whipped a smoky arm out of the room and latched onto me. I was yanked inside and heard the door slam shut. My table leg clattered to the floor.

I was suspended in some viscous substance, like thickened water, but I could breathe. It was similar to inhaling mist. I could move my body, but could not travel.

The dog made a noise again, but this time it was a savage, bestial snarl. Then I heard something like a mix between a gurgle and a moan, it might have been a man, but it was more supernatural than anything and echoed off the walls.

"Stop!" I shouted, the only word I could think of. Then, my immobility still active, the darkness began to shrink and the room was slowly unraveling. With each inch the darkness retreated, my eyes grew wider and wider as I realized where I was. Cages of various sizes were stacked as high as the ceiling. Dozens of little white, glowing eyes bobbed and swayed through the bars, but that was all I could see.

Eventually the darkness condensed into the portion that held me, and the body the tentacle of shadow was attached to—a bulging, humped figure who appeared to be clothed by the obscure smoke. Two red slits appeared, then two more, and two more, until I was staring at six glowing red eyes.

And to my right, crouched close to the floor and ready to spring, was a big, sand-colored dog. Behind the dog was an open cage with a warped door.

"Naughty worm," the darkness hissed, its words like water pouring onto hot embers. Another tendril appeared, this one reared back like a snake and with a wicked hook shaped on the end. The dog squared its shoulders and prepared to attack.

"No!" I screamed, and struck out with my foot at the dark being's eyes. My foot collided with something remotely solid, and the head stretched for a moment, but a moment was all the dog needed. He hurdled onto the monster and disappeared in its insides. The being shrieked and tossed me aside, breath shooting out of me as I slammed into the floor.

I watched the darkness buckle and thrash like a fish, trying to expel the beast that was tearing it apart from the inside out. Eventually the dog's teeth must have found something vital, because there was a wet crunch and the darkness squealed and collapsed into a pool of ink. The dog limped away from its kill and stopped, staring at me, cocking his head to the side.

"Good dog," I said, holding out my hands. I had risen into a squat. "Good dog," I repeated, unable to say anything else in my state.

He growled once, bristling, then dashed out the doors behind me. I rose slowly, rubbing my rib cage, one hand on the flashlight. As I turned to leave, I heard a bubbling sound and saw a black snake wrap around my waist—the being had come back to life, or it had never died.

"Annie," came Dr. Scythe's voice behind me. "So good to see you again."

"I'm not your fucking Annie!" I bashed at the tendril around my waist with the flashlight I still held, only to hit myself in the gut. The tendril dissipated at the last second. I landed hard on my knees and groaned. Harsh laughter filled my ears, sickeningly familiar. Turning around, I saw Scythe and his red eyes, his lab coat, his eerie smile.

"Alone again I see," he rasped. "Ready for another treatment?"

A choked sob escaped my throat and mingled with a gag of disgust. I wanted to puke. I wanted to tear him to pieces, but he must have been made of smoke. He was unstoppable. My knees hammered my nerves as I crawled toward the door, but he seized my hands and tied them together. I had lost this battle again—and would continue losing it as long as these living nightmares plagued me.

Then the dog came charging into the room, and with a mighty leap he landed on Scythe's chest and tore at his surprised face. I heard his shrill cries of pain and anger, and turned to see him on the floor, rolling with the dog on his chest. There was blood now—smears of it—and it wasn't the dog's, far as I could tell. So this fiend was mortal after all.

My arm shot towards my pocket and grasped a handful of syringes. I ripped the caps off all of them and went over to Dr. Scythe. The big, feral dog was still on him, biting and salivating, and Scythe was trying to fight him off. I saw little hooks of darkness writhing under Scythe's back, trying to find purchase, and did not want to see what those were capable of.

Kneeling by his head, I brought my face very close to my tormentor's own ruined features. He still had one good eye left—the other had lost its goggle and had been torn out and was weeping blood everywhere.

"Try a dose of your own medicine, you fucking prick." I plunged all seven needles into his neck and pressed down. The fluids drained simultaneously into his bloodstream and he had time for one last thrash before he was still, a greenish substance trickling from the corners of his lips. The dog's jowls were still clamped on his neck, and I crawled away and grabbed the table leg I had dropped. I raised it over my head, took aim, and brought it down with all my weight onto Scythe's head. Blood, bone, and brain sprayed everywhere, and I turned my face away with eyes closed.

Lowering the weapon, I opened my eyes and saw the ruined, pulpy mass that had once been the source of my agony. The room was quiet now, except a dripping that I slowly became aware of. I looked down at my hands and saw they were drenched in red. The color of my newfound freedom.

My head buzzed and my chin and shoulders sagged. I collapsed onto my side and, with the last of my strength, scrawled my new name in blood on the tiles amongst the chunks of brain—the raw material of the mind:

_NIMH._


	10. Leaving Hope

(A/N: Sorry it took so long to update! I've been busy with school and the previous chapters were written over my spring break. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Silent Hill belongs to Konami. I don't own or intend to make profit from this work; it is solely for my own entertainment.)

Chapter 10: Leaving Hope

In the shed, Nimh's hand told her to stop writing. She set her pen down frequently to flex her hand, shaking it every so often to get the blood flowing into her cramped fingers. There wasn't much more to finish at this point.

She reached out to her side, felt Kodiak's fur, and gave him a good scratching. The dog woofed in his sleep and she felt his leg twitch. He was even on the prowl for monsters in his dreams, the poor thing. His relentless guarding of her was her safest bet out of here.

_Now_, Nimh thought, _to finish my story_.

And she wrote on.

_Stonewall isn't exactly in Silent Hill. It's situated in the woods just outside of town. To be truthful, people come from all over the state; the institution was not exclusive to any one place. I hail from the town of Bastion, Virginia. The events leading to my institutionalization are stranded along the thread of my memory in loose scraps._

_My time here, however, I remember very clearly._

_I left the asylum shortly after Rutilus's demise. When I stepped outside, it was the foggiest day I had ever seen. It looked to be twilight, by the dim gray hue of the sky, which was tinged with a deep orange in the direction the sun was setting. Every breath felt cold and lined with dew. Strange, feathery snow fell from the sky. Some of it landed on my arm and I looked down to see ash smeared there. Ash, then. Not snow._

The sky is raining ash. That's fucking creepy_, I thought. But now I was beginning to expect the abnormal—didn't make things any less disturbing._

_My instincts upon leaving the asylum, pertaining to where I should go next, were the first evidence that hinted my past life might be an illusion, as well. I am still unsure. It's a horrible feeling, like treading in deep, dark water in a vast ocean with no land in sight. You could be anyone. You could be subject to anything._

_If I had a normal life, my first instincts would have been to go home. To see my mother and tell her what happened. Then we would go to the authorities and have the hospital shut down. But those were not my inclinations—the thoughts didn't even cross my mind._

Sam_, I said aloud. _I've got to find Sam. He'll understand.

_I ran down the road, cutting across the cul de sac in front of the building and making my way through the fog. My flashlight did little to slice through the congealed mist. It rolled over the road and between the trunks of trees._

_It was all so surreal. But I knew I wasn't imagining it, as Rutilus would have wanted me to believe. The sick bastard…I hoped he was burning in the pits of some Bible-thumper's hell. Little did I know, I was already in my own._

_The road descended, nothing but bare, skeletal trees mixed with thick pines, some as tall as four, maybe five stories. I flanked the guard rail and struggled to see past the tree line, where there was perhaps civilization._

_When I got to a T-intersection, leading to route-73, I encountered something that nearly drove me to believe I was nuts. Where the road should have continued to my right, toward Bastion, was a cliff, marking some abyss of unknown distance and depth._

_I inched as close to the edge of the precipice as my nerve allowed, craning my head to see downward. The road just crumbled away, and the earth underneath it, into a bottomless white void. It made my stomach do flips and I had to turn around and walk in the other direction._

_Head spinning, I took some deep breaths and jogged East, toward a sign pointing to Toluca Lake and South Vale. This was a tourist attraction that my peers and I, as a general rule, avoided at all costs. It was a town for couples and cheesy getaways—prone to disaster, too. We all knew about the boating accidents and the coal mine fires, the kooks and loonies spouting their religious bullshit._

_Whatever, it was still a town. There would be people, and the police, and eventually a ride home. That is, unless I went to jail for killing a doctor._

_Somehow, though, I knew I didn't have to worry about jail._

_I glanced around one last time, unsure of whom or what I was looking for. I wondered what had happened to the dog, and hoped he wasn't suffering. There was no way I was going to look for him, even though my love of animals exceeds love of people. Can you really blame me at this point?_

_It took two or three hours of walking until I strode past the observation deck. This area was relatively familiar to me; I had driven there before en route to other places. There would be bathrooms another mile or so up the road._

_Another half hour and I had wandered into South Vale. There were no signs of people, only their abandoned cars and the gloom of the streetlamps hinted of any inhabitants. I walked on, certain I would find someone in Silent Hill._

_Nathan Avenue led to West Sandford Street. By then, my feet were aching and I needed a rest, so I stopped in the Lakeside Hotel. The hotel was open year round, but there wasn't a soul inside. I swiped a key from the front desk and found a room upstairs. It had a beautiful view and broad windows leading out to the balcony. The kind of low-key place I was never very interested in; I preferred the boardwalk at the beach or someplace exotic._

_I stretched out on the bed and drifted off, still in my tattered, dirty nurse's uniform. I awoke from my catnap to the harsh sound of static, but when I sat up, all was quiet. I went over to the armchair in front of the TV and sat down, rubbing my sore feet and staring at the screen. There was a black VHS player hooked up on the floor, but no video tapes around._

_It had to have been the TV that woke me up. There had been something else in the static, too. A woman's voice, calling someone's name. It sounded like Dave, maybe James. To tell the truth, it was just a faint cry overshadows by the static. It was probably just my imagination._

_The room started to freak me out, so I got out of there and continued on the northbound road into what I knew to be Central Silent Hill. Having never been there before, I didn't know what to expect._

_I was on the south part of town and walking down Loon Street. It was lined with skinny trees with dead leaves clinging to them in clumps. Not but an hour or so of exploring and I knew the town was abandoned. Strange shapes hulked in the shadows and darted just out of my line of vision. These were the Devourers, the monstrous insects that eat everything that moves._

_Eventually I found the shed in the back yard where I now write this. Kodiak and I found each other when I was out hunting for food. He saved me again from a creature on two legs, whose upper torso was fused together. They spit acid at you if you don't watch yourself. He brought it down with the same ferociousness of a bear._

_That's why I named him Kodiak. It means bear. I don't know what language, though, just heard it from somewhere._

_We can't stay in this shed forever. I've got figure this out._

_-Nimh_


	11. The Grave that Wept

Chapter 11: The Grave that Wept

The journal was closed, laying on the floor next the pen it had been written with. There was no label on the front; she figured it didn't matter. But should she take it with her? Nimh stared down at the journal, debating, her front teeth hooked into her bottom lip. Kodiak whined and scratched at the door. She turned around and slid the lock up, and the door groaned woodenly as she opened it.

She stepped onto the ramp leading out of the shed and turned around to shut the door. The shotgun was strapped to her back (which she had yet to use because she was afraid of hurting herself with it, but kept it as a necessity) and the handgun had its usual place in her waistband. She took one last look at the journal and shut the shed door with conviction. The little composition book contained many memories that, one day, she might be able to face again. But not now. She let those memories lie dormant in their cage of ink and paper.

"Let's do a bit of exploring again, 'kay?" she asked Kodiak. The dog was already trotting about and sniffing at patches of grass and fence posts, all trauma of the previous day forgotten. Or at least, he wasn't showing any trauma—animals often kept stuff inside, she recalled. It was a survival instinct.

About an hour later, Nimh sat with Kodiak on the curb outside of a convenience store, on a street she hadn't checked yet. She was scraping at a can of peaches, and Kodiak was gnawing on the last of a frozen hank of meat she'd found in a freezer. As she peered into the dark mouth of the can at the syrupy leftovers at the bottom, Nimh heard an absence of chewing and slurping.

She looked and saw the meat bone, bare and white and picked clean on the cement, but no dog.

"Shit." She rose, throwing the can and fork onto the ground with a clatter. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called "Kodi!" several times.

Nothing. Just the fog and the gray street and the empty buildings. God, this place was monotonous as fuck.

"Kodiak!" she hollered, and her vocal chords stung. A faint "woof!" drifted out of the camera store across the street. Nimh heaved her shoulders in a sigh and stormed up to the building, taking heed of the door that hung innocently ajar.

The dog had jumped onto one of the display tables and was snuffling at a piece of paper so hard that he nearly pushed it off the table. Nimh dashed to him and snatched the paper up before that could happen.

"What's this?"

She flipped the paper over and saw that it was a photo. Not just any photo, however, but a picture of Dr. Rutilus' lab. There were the unmistakable animal cages, the doors solid metal with the exception of several tiny, bar-like slits, and the lab equipment. Nimh flipped the photo over again. There was very scratchy, sloppy handwriting on the back.

_Proof__._

The handwriting looked familiar. She stashed it in her pocket. The dog was staring at her from the tabletop.

"Come on and get down."

He seized a camera in his teeth and began to chew on it. Nimh pushed him gently off the tabletop.

"Gimme that camera. Come on boy. Good dog." She tried coaxing him to drop it. He wagged his tail and ran from her a few paces. Nimh tried being assertive, but that didn't work, either. She inched closer to him and made a dive for the camera strap. Her fingers snagged it and she pulled. The dog pulled back. He was determined to make it tug-of-war, then. Nimh pulled herself into a crouch and wrestled with him, eventually wrenching the slobber-soaked camera free.

"Jesus. If this thing ever works again, I'll be surprised." She flipped the camera over in her hands, her dirty nails tracing along its contours for compartments.

The battery hatch was open, she noticed, and instead of batteries there was a plastic vial, of the kind used to collect hairs or fibers for DNA.

"Why am I not surprised?" Nimh scoffed, but she plucked out and pocketed the vial as a precaution. She walked back out onto the sidewalk and headed Northwest. They came to a graveyard, which was much more open than the streets. Nimh entered through an opening along the stone gate, and Kodiak bounded past her, excited at the prospect of running around.

"Don't go too far!" she yelled after him. As if it made a difference. As if he knew what she was saying. The dog stopped and looked back at her, just as he was about to pass over a hill and out of sight. "Wow. Nice." She put her hands on her hips and whistled nonchalantly, surveying the graveyard for oddities.

Kodiak lifted his leg on a grave. Nimh chased him off and glanced back at the tombstone.

"Sorry Mr. or Ms…" she began, but the epitaph had worn away. A nameless grave, with wings and bust of an angel looking down over it. Some guardian angel, Nimh mused. She crouched and brought her face close to the stone. Ok, that was definitely a 'C' for the beginning of the name.

It wasn't just the worn surface of the grave that made it difficult to read the leaders. It was getting dark. Nimh called nervously for Kodiak, who came over at once, his ears pricked and his hair standing on end.

"It's ok Kodi. We'll duck in to a building some place until—"

A loud dripping stole her words. She looked down and saw a crimson, umbrella-shaped droplet on her shoe. She raised her eyes and found the source: the angel head was crying. Two red trickles flowed out of the sunken sockets. She took out the plastic tube and unscrewed the black cap, then collected the bloody tears until the vial was full.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?" Nimh demanded, looking around. Her answer was a loud, rapid clicking, the sound of many hollow legs. Kodiak growled. Together, they ran out of the cemetery before the noise could take form.


	12. Newton's Cradle

Chapter 12: Newton's Cradle

The way they had come was blocked. Nimh and Kodiak stood, each with their legs planted firmly to the tarmac. Creatures Nimh had never seen before were coming toward them. The figures were of a vague human shape, about her height, only their skin was entirely blackened, as if from third degree burns. They stumbled drunkenly, their eyes yellow and pathetic. They reached out toward one another, only to push each other away violently, unable to stand one another's company. All together they made up a small battalion, and Nimh did not have enough ammo for each of their ugly, charcoaled heads.

She and her dog dashed in the other direction. Cement walls rose up on either side, covered in graffiti, splintered with cracks and tinctured with holes. The only way to go was forward. And forward led to a large, two-storied building with glass stairwells built on either side. Nimh knew without reading any sort of sign that it was a high school. She squinted. It was very similar to her own, actually.

When things had been remotely normal in her life, she had hated school. But where did that hatred spurn from? It was beyond the normal feelings of angst, boredom, and apathy that most students experienced. What Nimh felt, standing there sizing up the impassive walls, the sheer height and forcefulness of the building, was loathing. But why? she thought, her heart pounding and her blood boiling. Why am I seeing red?

They walked by a tall, rusted flag pole, with nothing but dirtied scraps blowing weakly at the top. Kodiak raised his snout to sniff the air, and he displayed reluctance as Nimh took the stairs leading to the entrance. He stayed close to her side as she shut the doors and they were immersed in darkness.

Nimh switched on her flashlight and began to explore.

"Welcome to Silent Hill High," she muttered, her voice less than thrilled, and with good reason. The building gave her the creeps—it was an exact replica of her high school in Rochester.

"Well, this should make navigating a little easier. I don't even need a map," Nimh mused aloud. She wondered if her old locker combination still worked. Nah, better to start at the principal's office. She headed down the main hallway, then turned right. To her left was the gym, and across from this were the administrative offices and counseling services. The door to counseling was locked, but the door to the principal's office was open.

She stepped inside. Often, the secretary and other office employees complained about the noise from the gym distracting them from their work. Ha, as if they actually worked. Every time she had come into the office (and that had been more frequent than she liked to admit) they were gossiping about friends or raving about the silly thing their cat did last night. Nimh blinked as the flashback ended.

A shadow shifted by the window of the principal's office. She retrieved the handgun, slowly, from her waist and approached the door. Kodi tucked his tail between his legs and whined softly. Nimh shushed him with a finger to her lips and laid a hand on the dirty brass doorknob. There was always a tentative moment before opening a door, like the fluttering of wings or the iridescence of dust motes, where the air seemed to tingle and her stomach taughtened.

Enough.

She shoved the door open and swept her light about the room. There was a desk, some filing cabinets, a trash can, a couple of chairs with their backs to the window. The place looked like people had stood up and left, mid-lounge. She checked under the desk, inspected each corner. No one was in the office, despite the phantom she had seen only moments ago.

In all honesty, she was quite used to strange occurrences by that point. She knew the best way to not be bothered by it was to keep herself busy. And so she inspected the room, first opening all the desk drawers. There was a lone copy of a book in the top right drawer. It was too odd to pass over.

She lifted the book, which had no title. The cover was jet black and smelled like old leather. She became aware of a faint beating sound, coming from the depths of the book. Kodiak whined again and hid under the desk.

"Fuh, coward," she smirked. "Afraid of a stupid book."

She opened the cover and nearly dropped the whole thing, emitting a sharp cry of disgust. The pages were…alive. There was no other word to describe it. Bulging veins snaked across yellowish skin, skin that should have been paper. The book was warm in her hands and where her thumbs touched the mutated sheets she felt blood flowing. In the middle of the book, connected in a ball of stringy red tissues and quivering blue arteries, was the small silver key to a filing cabinet. She reached in with her fingers and pinched the key, then pulled it out with one jerk.

Her stomach flipped as the veins attached to the key snapped and started spraying blood. She slammed the cover shut with a 'schlupp!' noise and dropped it. She hurriedly wiped her hands against her pants. Kodiak padded over, pawed at the book but would not bite it. The beating noise had stopped the second she had ripped the key out.

"Stay away," she told him. He followed her over to the filing cabinets. She tried the key on all of them. As she reached the last drawer on the bottom, a memory bubbled to the surface of her mind. It was a heavyset woman with a mass of curly orange-brown hair and glasses, unlocking a similar set of filing cabinets with a silver key. The cabinets were against a different wall, and on the wall hung a cheesy inspirational photo of a beam of light cutting through a dark and gloomy forest.

The memory ended there, and Nimh knew where the cabinets were. She tried the inter-office door to the counseling center. "Yes." She heard the satisfying click as the knob turned. As she swung the door open, she was rewarded with the strong odor of mildew.

"Ugh." She covered her nose with the crook of her arm and proceeded. There were several nooks with desks and computers, as well as three or four offices for each of the counselors. She chose the third door on the left and opened it. The hairs on the back of her neck were standing up straight.

There was a sign on the front of the desk that read "Mrs. Barley". On the desk was a basket of doodads. Unable to contain herself, she went over and examined the toys. There was a rag doll with red hair and button eyes, a cup and ball with the string still attached, a pink slinky, a yellow smiley stress ball, and other things that didn't really interest her.

And there was a set of silver balls on strings in a metal frame, also known as 'Newton's Cradle'. Each ball on the string resembled a pendulum.

Curious, Nimh reached to touch the cradle. Kodiak growled deeply and brought her out of her haze. She went over to Barley's filing cabinet and unlocked the top drawer. There she sifted through the files, not really knowing what she was looking for. She pulled out a file at random and read through it. This one was the history of a student named 'Jason Burnes.'

B's. She was in the B's. Shouldn't she be checking the S's, for 'Starr'? She clucked her tongue for being silly and unlocked the third drawer down. There were the R's and then the S's. She checked and double-checked, but there was no 'Annie Starr' on record.

She went through the second drawer, and then the first and third drawers again to be thorough, before sighing and crouching down to pull out the final drawer. As she did so, the mildew stench grew stronger and she felt her gorge rising in her throat.

One of the file tabs was scribbled out in black sharpie. She tugged it loose and opened the manila folder. Inside was a set of papers, all very crinkled and printed on salmon-colored paper. The patient's name was scribbled out. In it were a set of notes in curly handwriting. Nimh strode over to Barley's desk and found some of her paperwork. The handwriting in the desk matched that of the notes in the folder. The notes read:

_Student ********* first impressions are that typical of one lost in the foster care system. Low self-esteem and sense of identity or belonging. Refusal to make eye contact. Her responses are curt and feel rehearsed. Posture is slightly slouched. I asked her how her day is going. She replies "Fine, I guess." Make small talk about the weather and upcoming snowstorm. She does not seem to care that school might be cancel, a reason for most students to rejoice. Too early to assume home life is unsatisfactory._

_********** has chosen Newton's Cradle from the basket of toys. Most students pick this, it is something they don't normally see and they want to know how it works. ********* sets the device in her lap and draws the steel ball back, lets it loose. The ball on the opposite end moves. Her eyes follow this before she sets the device on the desk._

_She does not express curiosity about the toys. I make a side comment about how these toys don't really compare to Game Boys. "Never had one," she tells me. "They're stupid, anyway."_

The note was torn away, but there was another sheet of paper behind it where it continued.

_After several sessions, suspect that student suffers from at least mild depression, although it is not in my position to diagnose. Severely envious of her peers. Have learned that she has been to several foster homes, some of them not officially recognized by the state. Coworker has informed me that recent tax cuts have been affecting the amount of welfare checkups we can accomplish. It is possible ********* has been to several abusive households. Will recommend outside care. Do not foresee her temperament improving without serious intervention. Concerned for overall wellbeing._

_-Janice Barley_

Nimh glanced nervously around the office. The weight of the shotgun was making her shoulders sore, and not for the first time she wondered if she should just abandon it. Then she thought about the content of the folder, sitting in Barley's chair. She rubbed her shoulders, wincing at the chafing the shotgun had caused.

Kodiak paced back and forth. Once or twice he raised his head to look past her, out the window. Nimh propped her head up with one arm resting on the desk, her face turned downward. The lights above her were flickering on and off, making a strange clicking sound, like the thump of moth wings against glass. Barley's notes were disturbing to her, but she didn't know why. Were they about her, or someone else? Whose blood was it in the plastic tube? And then there was the photo of Rutilus' laboratory, with handwriting she had never seen before.

Perhaps she had better explore the rest of the school. She stood, leaving the folder on Barley's desk. Kodi whooshed past her towards the door. She slammed it shut and left.

Upon this action, the sphere of the Newton's Cradle closest to the door lifted, as if through the help of invisible fingers. It hung in the air like some bizarre appendage, only for a moment, before it dropped and collided with the other pendulums, causing the opposite pendulum to swing out. The two endmost spheres continued this pattern, colliding, swinging, colliding again—creating a steady 'tack-tacking' in a room that was otherwise silent as a tomb.


	13. Locker 322

(A/N: Sorry for not updating in, like, forever. I am still interested in finishing this story! Progress has been slower than what I'd like it to be, but there you have it. Been busy with life, that pesky factor that seems to get in the way of my writing all the time. Bah. No matter.)

**By the Swing of the Pendulum**

**Chapter 13: Locker 322**

_You hold the answers deep within your own mind_

_Consciously, you've forgotten that_

_That's the way the human mind works_

_Whenever something is too unpleasant, too shameful for us to entertain_

_we reject it, _

_we erase it from our memory,_

_But the imprint is always there_

~"Understanding" by Evanescence

_Who—what—have I become?_

She climbs the school steps, her legs and sides aching. It is not just the nightmares she's running from. She knows this in her heart. She runs, too, from herself. From the site of her old life and torturous memories buried there.

_Am I still who I once was? Do I even want to be? Perhaps I am better off not knowing. _She stops, mid-stairwell, and leans against the wall, cupping her head in her hand.

The dog waits on a landing just a few steps ahead of her. His keen little eyes observe her slanted body, her hanging head, and her face, which does not bear its usual stony expression. His master's face has changed, seems to have shrunken, somehow. His nostrils expand and he catches a whiff of something salty and bitter. The odor is confusing to him.

She takes the shotgun down from its strap on her back and peers into the barrel. Not for the first time, she wonders if she was not meant to use this weapon, or the handgun, for that matter, on the monsters.

_Maybe it's the only way out of here._

The idea is not without its benefits. It would end the terror and pain, for one thing. Her thumb caresses the tip of the barrel.

The dog continues to watch her face. Now the girl is stroking the ring of the barrel with her thumb. She does not look at him the way she normally does when she is thinking about something. The dog lowers his ears and whines. The girl does not react to his plea.

Her mind fills with red, the color expanding until it eats up her thoughts like an amoeba absorbs its prey. She wants nothing more than for it to all go away. Rutilus is dead, his mangled body on the floor of the Asylum basement. The revenge should have been enough. But there are things left uncompleted. To die now would be a waste. She had to have answers.

The girl grasps the barrel of the gun and points it away from her. The dog's ears perk up again, and his instincts tell him that some great threat has just passed over. But barely.

_I don't even have any fucking bullets for this thing. Why do I lug it around? _Nimh lifts the shotgun again and straps it to her back. She cannot bear to part with it, just as she cannot bear to part with the mysteries of her old life.

_The town is trying to tell me something. That's why I am finding these clues. I may not WANT to know, but I can't die without knowing the truth._

She continues up the steps, the dog always a few ahead of her. They reach the second floor, with old lockers on either side, caked in rust, but the round combination locks still intact. Nimh's flashlight cuts through the thick darkness. Everything trembles; the vibrations of some great evil under thin restraint. The hallway seems to lengthen which each step…

Nimh's foot collided with something and sent it skittering across the floor. She lowered her beam and saw that it was one of the locks, only this one was broken. She searched to her right and found the locker that was missing its lock. Locker number 322. It didn't ring a bell; she couldn't remember hers or Sam's or Nichole's locker numbers. Her fingers grasped the latch and pulled up and out, the locker opening with a squeak. Nimh sighed in disappointment. It was empty. She checked the top shelf, feeling there with her hand. Nothing. She scanned the corners, sides, and bottom of the locker, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Except…

There was a small indentation on the back part of the locker. In fact, the entire back panel didn't look quite right. The corners were raised and the metal was slightly warped, as if someone had tried to remove it. She raised her leg and kicked at the panel. Bang! Bang! Crash! The back panel of the locker gave way and she pulled the metal sheet out and set it down on the floor.

"Holy shit, there's air coming from the wall," Nimh breathed. Kodiak stuck his snout inside the locker and sniffed fervently. She put one hand on his back, feeling the ridge of reverse-running hair along the spine. The dog must have sensed her intent, because he backed away and stared at her.

Nimh took the shotgun off and propped it just outside locker 322. Kodiak made a whimpering sound and shifted on his paws.

"What's wrong, boy?" She reached out to pet him, but he winced and shied away from her hand. No, not her hand—he was looking at the locker. "You don't have to follow me if you don't want to. I'll meet you back out here."

_Why am I speaking to him as if he were a child? He can't understand me. _She knew she was just saying these things to comfort herself. Kodiak was just a dog: loyal, trusting, but too trusting. He would not run if something tried to follow her into the locker—he would fight it to the death. A pit formed at the bottom of her stomach. Could she really just leave him in that hallway?

"I'm sorry Kodi," she said, adjusting her light. "I've got to go in here. You know that, don't you?"

His stance told her no, he didn't. She felt tears prick at her eyes. Kodiak padded over and put his head on her knee. He looked at her and then at the locker, his doggy brow furrowed with that genuine concern that dogs are so capable of showing. Nimh stroked his head and scratched lightly behind his ears.

"I'll be back," she told him, feeling her throat tighten. They had not been separated like this since their second meeting in the town proper, when he had saved her life, for the second time. Before she lost her nerve, she swallowed and turned around and squeezed her way, one shoulder at a time, into the locker. Her light trailed endlessly into the hole; there was no telling where or how far it went. Feeling like she was crawling her way into Narnia (albeit some twisted, demented form of the cute fantasy epic) she went forward on her hands and knees, her shoulders brushing the edges of a tunnel.

The air was very cold and lifted her bangs out of her eyes. She reached behind and made sure her handgun was still tucked into her waistband. Kodiak whimpered from the hallway. The noise hit a vital chord in her heart. She hesitated, crawled onward. The tunnel went on at a slight downward angle, then up again, then banked sharply to the right. Her hands and knees were quickly caked in dust and dirt, but it was not soil—it was more like concrete powder. She crawled for an unknown amount of time, until Kodiak's whining seemed as far away as a star. The silence inside the tunnel was thick and lonesome.

Her heart began to speed up. She did not like tight, confined spaces—not at all. How could she have forgotten that fact? Perhaps her curiosity had gotten the better of her, had put the old fear on the backburners of her mind at the promise of some goal. But the tunnel just went on and on. And God, it was cramped in here. She took a few deep breaths, only to inhale an irritating cloud of dust that had her coughing and gasping. After a minute the spasm passed.

"Shit…" she rasped, covering her mouth and stifling another wave of coughing. The dust was so thick that it distorted her flashlight beam, making it difficult to see only a few feet in front of her.

Perhaps she had gone too far. She should go back now, before she got too tired. It would be slow going, crawling ass-first, but she could do it.

_It's got to end sometime. All tunnels have an end._

Or did they? Perhaps it just went on forever, and she would collapse and die in here, her skeleton lying forever in the unknown depths of Silent Hill, reaching for the exit. And Kodiak would wait for her until the darkness swallowed him alive.

This set her into a panic, and she lunged forward, her breath escaping in little high-pitched gasps. Her hands and arms were gray up to her elbows; she kicked up more and more dust, until her arms, face, and neck were coated with the stuff. She hardly noticed as she clawed at the ground, legs thrashing behind her.

Cool air brushed against her face, drying the little rivers of sweat that ran down her temples. Her panic retreated some, but she could still feel it revving somewhere in her core. She pointed her face toward the air and felt the current grow stronger. The dust cleared a little and she could see up ahead, where the tunnel hit a wall and continued on the left and right. She went ahead carefully and reached a T-section, shining her light down the tunnel to her right first. It looked like it sloped down, and sharply. She shifted left and her light revealed a short section of tunnel, but it was what was at the end of it that interested her.

There was a wooden door. It was a brown smudge of color in an otherwise black and gray underworld. Nimh crawled toward the door and was pleased to find that she could rise to a crouch. She shuffled the rest of the way. The door was about 4 feet high and 3 feet wide, with a bottom like a regular door and a rounded top. There was a brass handle on the left hand side; clean and polished, it glinted in the beam of her light. The knocker was a bit more unsettling: a demonic face, with tiny, slitted eyes, curving horns, and a large, gaping mouth, it looked like a cross between a satyr and a leering child. The lever was the demon's tongue, which ended in a forked tip.

Not knowing why, she found that tongue offensive, like a fine statue with phallic undertones, or hidden Satanic messages in backwards-playing music.

"Christ," she swore. She looked away and turned her attention to the door handle, which was attached by a brass plate. There was a key hole in the plate, just beneath the handle. She tried the handle anyway, pulling hard. The door groaned a little, but otherwise may have been welded shut.

"Great." Nimh turned around. She came back to the T-section and went to the edge of the other tunnel, the one she had not explored. The ground sloped down, but it looked like she could get back up if she was careful. Going back up would be tiring, but it the key was down there…

She started down, the wall of darkness retreating slowly as she made her way. She took careful steps, planting her palms and knees carefully to avoid sliding. She might have gone 50 feet or so before she heard a strange sound, a sort of scratching and scraping, which stopped after a few seconds. How far away was it? Her flashlight revealed nothing, and she could see at least 20 feet down. She listened, and after half a minute the sound started again. It was not a mechanical sound, but something alive that was pushing its way toward her.

She began to back up, but the strange, slippery grit made it painfully slow. And the sound was becoming louder and more frequent. She was facing the ground and concentrating on her hands and knees so much that she failed to see what her flashlight was catching glimpses of. A thick, awkward shape bobbed in and out of the light, moving forward in unison with the scraping, falling silent as it fell back a little before the next move forward.

Only when she felt its hot, putrid breath on her face did she look up, only to scream in horror. A disgusting, slug-like creature was before her, the color of infected flesh. It was covered in little black nodules that oozed a yellow-green sludge, which brushed against the tunnel walls and caused a hissing _sssssshhhhh_ sound. Bits of concrete powdered the air where the acid from the thing's skin ate at the concrete—the dust she had been crawling through.

Nimh had little time to think about that, however. The slug-thing's maw opened at her, revealing large, strangely human teeth the size of her fist and massive, dripping black pincers on either side of its cheeks. The pincers stretched toward her hungrily. The monster had no eyes, but it knew she was there. It contracted its body and expanded towards her, but its prey was already retreating.

Scrambling backwards, Nimh hurried at fast as her muscles allowed. She ignored the resulting protests of pain in her back and buttocks, along with her knees, which were beginning to bleed despite the floor's soft, powdery coating. Sheer terror was driving her, the imprint of the monster's face right in front of her still fresh in her mind.

She seemed to be gaining distance, but the slug-thing made a low groaning sound and bunched itself together peculiarly. Then, like a loaded spring, it launched itself toward her, kicking up a wall of blinding dust. She wasn't sure of how close it had gotten, until she felt one of the pincers take a swipe at her hair. She cried out in shock and reached toward her waistband, only to find that the gun was not there. For a few seconds she scratched wildly at her back, trying to find her weapon, but it was gone.

"Fuck!" She screamed, and began to scramble backward again. The slug-thing lowed and squelched, salivating with greed for its next meal. It did the weird bunching-up thing again, and this time Nimh thought she would surely be devoured…

Her foot connected with something hard and she reached behind her, straining a muscle in her shoulder as she did so, but her fingers locked around the gun and she brought it forward, shooting wildly as the slug-thing sprung again. Hot, smelly juice sprayed against her face as her bullets thudded into the thing, eliciting a gurgling roar from her attacker. It shuddered and was still, its pincers still sweeping back and forth, uncertain of whether it wanted to continue pursuing this prey.

Nimh decided for it and fired her remaining two shots, knowing she would not be able to reload in time. She wouldn't have to. On that note, the slug-thing, now weeping its own rank blood and looking a bit deflated, began to retreat. It shoved backwards until it left her flashlight's path, and beyond that, she heard the scraping noise recede until it became a whisper, and then all was quiet again.

A few minutes later, she was back at the door. She gazed at the knocker like a riddle. The demon's face seemed to mock her. She felt her cheeks grow hot and her temper flare, but she couldn't even blink.

_Stupid girl, getting yourself nearly killed by the Tunnel-Dweller. Ha ha!_

_Didn't find a key down there, did you? Hee hee!_

_Have you got blood on your face? Now your exterior matches your interior—how disgusting!_

_Blood_, Nimh thought, and she dug in her pockets for the vial of bloody tears she had taken from the marble angel. She unscrewed it and tipped the vial. In the moment before she did this, she thought, absurdly, that the brass demon's face had exchanged its look of evil glee to one of terrible malice. The blood dribbled onto the tongue and she grabbed it, knocking three times as hard as she could.

There was a small grating sound of a locking mechanism turning, and then the door popped open. Nimh's hand was still grasping the tongue, and she felt it grow hot and slippery beneath her palm.

"Yeck!" She drew her hand away in disgust, her palm trailing bloody saliva. The demon's face was back to glee.

"Fuck you." She offered him her middle finger as she pushed the door open. She entered another tunnel, this one big enough to stand in. Her joints popped and her muscles tingled with relief as she stretched and sighed.

The floor beneath her feet shuddered, cracked, and then Nimh felt her stomach drop as she fell into darkness.


	14. Phantoms

By the Swing of the Pendulum

Chapter 14: Phantoms

Air rushed through her ears and dust stung her eyes, blinding her. She fell feet first, legs thrashing, and braced herself for the inevitable impact. When she hit the water, the first thing that went through her mind was _I'm alive, I'm ok!_ followed by a burning in her lungs. For a moment she floated, stunned, and then she hit bottom and pushed off and broke the surface.

Gasping, she forced herself to be as quiet as possible and listened. Something was dripping from all around. The sound of water droplets plummeting from stalactites? The air was sticky and reeked of iron. She didn't know how far underground she was, but guessed that she was in a cave near Toluca Lake. She began to swim, her flashlight miraculously still in place and floating with her, a thin skin of light in the water. The air smelled foul and warm, and her light had a pinkish hue to it. After a while she could stand without going under. The smell seemed to worsen as the water level dropped. She brought her right hand up out of the water. Her hand was the color of bright red wine.

"Oh God," Nimh choked. She thrashed her way forward, pumping one foot off the ground after the other. Her flashlight emerged from the water and she could see better now, could see the red-brown water and the long cages hanging from the rocky ceiling by chain, and saw the dripping things those cages contained, twisted and gray and only vaguely human.

A few bloody drops pattered on her forehead. She wiped these away with a trembling hand, refusing to panic. Now she was waist deep in the filthy water and could see steps and a platform up ahead and a door with a red light above it. There was no sign of anyone, but _someone_ had to have hung the cages. As she got closer to the door she heard a girl talking from behind it.

The voice was familiar, and it took Nimh a minute to recognize the speaker. After a moment, she lunged out of the water onto the steps, calling, "Nichole? Nichole?"

The voice stopped. Nimh reached the top of the steps and approached the door. "Nichole, is that you?" she called. She was lonely and exhausted, and made foolish with the hope that there was another human being just beyond that door. Still, she pressed her bloodied hands to the warm metal.

"Are you there? It's An—" But she cut herself off. Annie was not her name. Annie was the bastard shrink's name for her. She was Nimh now, not a product of the National Institute of Mental Health, but something much darker.

"It's your best friend."

Whoever was behind the door laughed mirthlessly. She opened the door, blood dripping and pooling at her feet. Nichole was in front of her, standing in a round room amongst a dozen or so filthy medical gurneys. The room looked like a mix between a morgue and a torture chamber. Her friend was in a white medical gown, barefoot, the body tag still attached to her toe. Her cheeks were bone-white and her red-brown hair was tangled and clotted with dirt.

Nimh leaned against the doorframe, panting. "Nicky. What happened to you? Why are you—?" She couldn't say it, not when her best friend was standing there, looking at her with such contempt. Nicky smiled at her, her bloodshot eyes empty and sad. She turned around, exposing her naked back, the flesh black, puckered and swollen all over where she had been struck by something, and hard. Nimh could see her ribs poking through the holes.

Nichole broke into a run and opened a door on the other side of the room. Nimh ran after her, pushing the gurneys aside, and noticed the cutting tools, the sledgehammer, and a giant blade that she had seen before.

She exited the room and was in a narrow hallway that banked to the right. The floor was marked with heavy drag marks and smears the color of crude oil.

_The demon from Stonewall left these traces. That room must be where he takes his victims._ During her time in Silent Hill, she couldn't banish her fear, but she had learned to think of a few things while she was fleeing, or fighting, for her life. One of those things was whether or not she had a means to fight the thing she was fleeing from. Her handgun was jammed in her pocket, but it was clogged and wouldn't fire. The shotgun was in the hallway with Kodiak. She doubted either weapon would do her any good.

She could hear Nichole running, just ahead. From behind her she heard deep, rattling breaths, but she would not look. Only run. Another trick she had learned to surviving in this hell: don't look back. The walls and tiles cut off abruptly and were replaced with rocks and wooden beams. Her feet pounded on the metal floor, which was punched with holes, and she could feel the heat from fires burning underneath, melting her rubber soles.

"Nichole! Stop!" she cried, the fumes from the mines choking her words. She struggled for breath, head growing dizzy with the toxins in the air. Nichole was a white blur that whipped around the corners. The demon's breathing gusted behind her. His blade rang out as he dragged it, so heavy, and she was bolting, but he was closing in on her.

The air wavered with the heat and noxious gasses. Nichole was nowhere to be found. Despair replaced fear, and as the fear left her energy latched onto it and fled. She slowed to a limping jog and then her feet grew as heavy as lead. Black dots danced in front of her eyes. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up as the man-creature behind her drew closer.

Time dragged by on cement-stiffened appendages. She was dimly aware of her own sweat dripping onto the metal floor, where it hissed and hopped, the way spit bubbles and jumps on an iron stove. Her feet felt like she was standing on simmering coals. The sounds of the tunnel overtook the pounding in her ears: the whoosh of hot air from below, the screeching knife of the demon, soon to overtake her, the gears of distant machinery groaning in the dark. The gears of a giant clock, or a pendulum—indeed, she could hear each click as it swung back and forth.

She fell again, this time not so far, but into darkness so thick and vast, she thought it might be death's cloaked embrace.

* * *

Someone strokes her cheeks and forehead. Stupid doctors, why do their checkups have to get weirder and weirder? They've already examined her head at least a dozen times. And whoever they are, they must have just washed their hands, because their fingers are wet. And warm. And—slimy?

Nimh opens her eyes. A yellow dog with floppy ears and chocolate eyes laps at her face with a pink tongue. A pink tongue with a brown spot.

"Jasmine?" she asks, and the dog wags her tail and barrages her with fresh doggy kisses. She looks over the dog just to be certain, but there is no mistaking it. This is Sam's dog. She throws her arms around Jasmine's chest and presses her face into the dog's golden fur gratefully, holding back a sob. What a terrible nightmare!

"I'm so happy to see you, girl," she says, and stands shakily to her feet. A fresh sting of pain travels up both her arms. The skin from her left elbow down, and all the way along her right arm, is dotted with white circles surrounded by thin red burns. Her face slowly draws itself into a portrait of woe. The patterns on her skin match those of the metal in the mine tunnel, branded where her arms had touched the floor.

It hadn't been a dream. She is still in the nightmare, still in Silent Hill. She sobs again and takes a deep breath. Jasmine sits there, gazing up at her with her peculiar stare.

They are in a hallway that looks like a scene from the abandoned buildings near Chernobyl. The white floor tiles are dirty and scattered, revealing the cement floor beneath. The windows are busted and white light drifts through them. Wherever she is, it looks to be in a long state of decay, and it is devoid of sound. She takes a step forward and winces as sharp pain stabs at her foot.

The soles of her sneakers have melted away. She tries to wiggle her foot inside her shoe, only to discover that her sock has fused to her skin in places.

"Fantastic. That's going to hurt like a bitch later," she growls. Jasmine, normally a well-behaved dog, yips and tugs on her pant leg, hard. She begins to growl. Nimh pushes her away. "Ow! Quit that Jas; that hurts!"

The dog bounds in front of her, toes clicking on the tiles, and barks—high and shrill. Her ears ring for a minute afterward as she walks down the hall. Outside, there is nothing but white-gray fog and the road.

_Is this still the school? _Nimh wonders. She gets her answer as she enters the room at the end of the hall. It is a court room, with the judge's stand in the middle and the jury boxes on either side. Benches are lined up in the center, most of them either tipped over or broken in two from large chunks of stone that have fallen from the ceiling. She looks up and sees a massive hole, broken bits of pipe and beams twisting out like frays on a piece of cloth. It looks as if an angered god has lowered his foot and stomped through the roof.

Above the judge's stand are the Ten Commandments, along with the biggest wooden cross and crucified Jesus she's ever laid eyes on. She avoids looking at it for too long—there is something in the dead Christ's face, his closed eyes, bloodied brown hair, and downturned mouth that makes her think of Nichole.

Jasmine skirts the benches and jumps onto the judge's stand. She leaps onto the very spot where a judge might have rested his arms, many years ago. The hammer is nowhere to be found. Nimh checks the judge's seat, but only finds a dusty Bible and a wooden crucifix. She goes over to the plaintiff's seat and finds nothing. She is about to give up and leave when she spots a cardboard box sitting in a chair where the accused would have sat.

"CASE FILE NO. 23345" the box reads. Nimh lifts the lid and her heart races as she reads Nichole's name on the file tab. A quick rifling through the papers and she finds a white sheet of paper that interests her. It is the lawyer of the Mantle family's statement of what happened to her friend:

_On the night of September 12, 2005, Nichole Mantle, age 16, was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by Caleb Fisher, 32, at around 10:30 p.m. Mr. Fisher has a known history of mental illness and was committed to the institution Stonewall Asylum, without permission of leave. Mr. Fisher is a permanent patient at Stonewall and has been there for 12 years. He is a paranoid schizophrenic and suffers from delusions. Security cameras from the asylum show the patient Fisher leaving the asylum at approximately 10:22 p.m., where he hijacked an employee car in the parking lot._

_Nichole was walking down a side road leading away from the asylum. It is believed that she had been to Stonewall to visit another patient, Michelle Williams, age 17, a friend who was committed in 2004. Camera footage shows her leaving the asylum at 10:10 p.m., over two hours after visiting hours end at Stonewall. It is unknown as to what she did during the time slot of 8 p.m. to when she left the institution. No patients were able to provide evidence, as they had all gone to their rooms for the night. The patrolling staff did not report seeing her, nor was she filmed on any of the asylum's numerous security cameras._

_Nichole Mantle died almost immediately on impact. The right fender of the stolen vehicle, driven by Fisher, collided into the victim's back, shattering most of her spine and ribs, causing severe internal hemorrhaging. Fisher has confessed to purposefully swerving his vehicle to strike the victim. When asked as to why he would want to take Nichole Mantle's life, Fisher said to the police, "I had to do it. Nichole was part of the conspiracy. I had to do it! She couldn't get away with that."_

_Fisher believes that Nichole Mantle was a member of a secret cult that was performing unsanctioned experiments on the patients at Stonewall. While his story has been deemed a delusion of a paranoid schizophrenic, further psychological analysis revealed that someone planted these ideas in his head. Someone at Stonewall took advantage of Caleb's disease, with the direct purpose of killing Nichole Mantle._

_Authorities have organized an investigation of the asylum. While their exact methods cannot be disclosed to the public, they do intend to question both the patients and the staff of Stonewall. _

_On a personal note, the parents of Nichole Mantle wish to express their deepest sorrow at having lost their only beloved daughter. They would like the people of the court to know that, while they could not attend Caleb Fisher's trial for health reasons, they are very sorry for Caleb, that he was abused for his illness, and that they bare him no ill will. They wish for the person who provoked Caleb to be found and held responsible for his or her actions. This person, the Mantle's say, is the real criminal, but Mr. Fisher should be apprehended for his actions accordingly._

_Signed,_

_Harold P. Winston, Attorney-at-Law, PhD._

Nimh places the lawyer's statement back into the folder. She scans the rows and rows of seats and imagines a big, important-looking man in an expensive suit rattling off his statement to the jury. Could Dr. Rutilus have provoked Caleb into killing Nichole? What had she done to elicit such a thing? Her stomach is writhing in knots and she has to take the paper back out and read one particular part again.

_-believed that she had been to Stonewall to visit another patient, Michelle Williams…_

"I am Michelle Williams," Nimh says to the empty court room, in a timid voice that she hardly recognizes. Or, almost empty. She turns around to see what Jasmine is doing, but the dog has vanished.

"Jaaaaaasmiiiiine!" she cups her hands and calls. Light shines through holes in the wall, onto the jury boxes and the stands. It's as if the dog has faded, or perhaps just gone back into her memory. She feels something hard against her back and removes her handgun. Ejects the clip. A large clot of congealed blood plops onto the floor. She cleans it out with her shirt, but her shirt is already filthy and nothing is accomplished. She stares at the gun in her grubby hand and knows she is defenseless. She walks over to the judge's stand and places the clip and the gun on the dusty wooden surface. Looks up. The hanging Christ's eyes are not entirely closed—they are lowered with pain and the final acceptance of the dying, but his carved pupils are visible, and they are pointed towards the seat of the accused. It was probably placed that way with the intention of provoking honesty out of the accused—or perhaps just guilt.

Nimh turns away. She wants nothing more than a shower, a meal, and some sleep. She wants Kodiak by her side again. Seeing Sam's therapy dog has rekindled her loneliness. And something tells her that there are more answers in Nichole's case file box. She doesn't know how an evidence box ended up in this decrepit, creed-heavy room, but she does know that she was meant to open it. She picks up the box and shuffles out of the courtroom, praying that she does not run into anything that would require two hands for her to escape from.

She wishes Jasmine would turn up again, but there's no point to wishful thinking. That dog hadn't come across entirely as Sam's dog, anyway. Her disposition wasn't as sweet and controlled. More like a phantom than the real thing.

"That's all this place really is," Nimh breathes heavily as she carries the box in the middle of the road. "Just a phantom come back to haunt me."

She stops in her tracks and feels cold sweat break out along her spine. Was that a scraping, screeching sound she just heard? Or was it her imagination?

Urgency strikes her; she's running out of time. Nimh scrunches up her dirty face and gathers herself, before running into the fog, leaving behind the pillars and cracked foundations of the courthouse.


	15. Guardian Angel

Chapter 15: Guardian Angel

The box grew heavy in her arms. As Nimh walked down the street, she loathed the feeling of exposure. Without any guns, without Kodi, what did she have to fend off those creatures? The fog was thinner here, she could see farther. Nevertheless, she kept her ears open and her eyes sharp, but she was half as paranoid as she should have been. Her thoughts were elsewhere. Memories were flooding back to her, things that she had repressed for days were flooding her in flashes.

Billy Rogers, who had always made high-pitched, crazy noises whenever she'd walk by him in the hall. He would have his friends join in, and then they would all stare at her, muttering and snickering. She was the crazy girl, the girl with no family, the girl with shabby clothes and mousy hair who didn't talk or gossip or go to football games. The girl who went to the guidance councilor's, where all the troubled kids went.

A teacher at her high school who had been very kind to her—Mrs. Holly, her name had been. She taught English in the ninth grade, and had given Nimh books to read when she was feeling down. Mrs. Holly always liked Nimh's ideas when she called on her. Then she moved on to tenth grade, Nimh never saw much of her favorite teacher after that.

Her last foster family, the Livingston's, and how they would stare at her at the dinner table, picking over their food, waiting for her to say something. She hated speaking in front of them. They had taken her away from that home in less than a year. It had been her fault. She hadn't meant to push 14-year-old Katherine down the stairs, but Kathy had called her weird, and stupid, and told her that she didn't belong with them and that she hated her. It had only been one little shove, Nimh had to do it, otherwise, her boiling blood would have made her explode.

Her newest foster mother, Jodie. She was kind and always willing to listen, but Nimh knew she hadn't fully understood her. She didn't know what it was like, with her big, extended family and grandparents that doted on her. She had taken Nimh in on some agenda to fulfill her 'Christian duties'. Although she had never forced Nimh to go to church with her. That part she HAD liked.

Nichole, at the local park, sitting under a big oak tree with her. They had been eating ice cream in the thick summer heat, watching butterflies flit to and fro. Nichole always had the right answers in class. She was very smart, and loved math, and her parents expected great things. Nimh still wasn't very sure as to how they ended up as friends, but now, in this desolate and haunted place, she could remember so many details of their friendship that she couldn't question its existence. And she couldn't believe that Nichole was dead. What a horrible way to die…no, the images that filled her head, of Nichole's bruised and bloody body in a ditch, with some nut-job behind the wheel of a car with a fresh dent…the images had to go. Nimh was glad that she did not have to see Nichole's parents. And as for her own foster mother…what she didn't know about her was probably for the better.

She sat down from sheer exhaustion and pried through the box. It was filled with police work, but at the bottom something caught her eye. She lifted a small plastic baggie with a silver key inside. She looked back inside the box for a label or a slip of paper indicating what the key was for, but there was nothing useful. But the key, the key was definitely special. She pocketed it and rummaged once more through the box. Some of Nichole's belongings, found at the scene of the crime, were also in baggies, including a cracked cell phone, her wallet (empty), and a prescription bottle (anti-bacterial pills).

_Why were you walking home alone, in the dark, Nichole? _Nimh thought, chewing her bottom lip. _Did you sneak out against your parents' wishes? Is that why you couldn't take the family car? I'll bet that was why._

She struggled with the memory. Yes, Nichole had seen her at the asylum, and had stayed past visiting hours. They had had a fight about something, but what?

"Damn it!" Nimh screamed, and kicked the box savagely. It skidded off the side of the walk and tipped over. "I want to remember!" she shouted at the empty buildings and the dark sky.

She stood up, her face hot and her eyes brimming with tears. Her best friend was dead, a ghost roaming the shadows of Silent Hill, and she couldn't even remember the night she was killed.

_I'm just a fuck-up, a nobody. My past doesn't even matter. Why am I being tortured?_ Nimh despaired. She stood still, head bowed, combating the urge to find another gun and end this miserable dance of confusion and running, once and for all.

From far away, an agonized yelp filled her eardrums. Her head jerked up, her matted hair flying.

"Kodi!" Nimh yelled shrilly, her heart palpitating fast. She ran in the direction of the noise, clearing two and then three blocks, stopping when her feet positively sang with pain. Quivering and sweating, she forced her noisy lungs to be quiet and listened. Another howl, this one more aggressive, and much louder, came down an alley and straight at her. She ran through the alley, nearly tripping over a fallen trashcan, and saw something very unnerving on the ground: bloody tracks, neither human nor mammalian, but something dog-sized, and with many legs.

Nimh rounded the corner and, sure enough, there was the old high school. She traveled up the steps at a pace that seemed inhuman, but was never fast enough, though her legs ached. She stopped for breath at the entrance and prayed that she wasn't too late.

_Stupid stupid stupid how could you have left him for so long, he waited for you and you abandoned him and if he's hurt it's _YOUR_ fault!_

"Kodi!" Nimh cried hoarsely, too tired to cry or scream or run. She plodded forward and reached the hallway where she had left him and seized the abandoned shotgun, then remembered that she had no ammo and threw it away from her in disgust.

She could hear the harsh, brutal snarls of a dog attacking something, or something attacking a dog. She also heard something non-living, or so it seemed, a kind of rustling and whooshing, like leaves being crunched in a trash bag or a cloak sweeping around a corner. She descended the stairs, was just outside the gym and there, blessedly, was a rack of baseball bats that she had overlooked in her earlier search for the principal's office.

Her fingers curled around the handle of a metal bat. The fight was inside the gymnasium—she heard Kodiak snarling, yipping as whatever he was attacking fought back. The sound was horrible, worse than any human argument or taunt, and it hurt her to the core knowing that she could have prevented it.

She put her shoulder into one of the double doors, and struggled to focus on what she saw. A shape that she just barely recognized as a dog, covered in long, leech-like things that floated, darted and slithered, circled and rebounded, covering Kodiak in their writhing little bodies and nipping at his fur with their angry mouths. Kodi crunched their bodies in half and ripped them off his back by seizing their tails (or was it their heads?) in his jowls and pulling, but for every one he killed, another joined the swarm from the shadows.

Nimh ran over, swinging the bat and hitting the creatures whenever one would raise its flat, shit-colored head. They were fast, swimming inches above the floor, their sides undulating like those of flatworms in the ocean. She squashed them under her feet, ignoring the slippery guts that soaked through the pathetic remains of her shoes.

_There's too many of them, I'll never get them off him!_ she thought as she whacked another one that had stood up on Kodi's back. The wooden floors of the gym were quickly accumulating bodies and dark, maroon fluid that smelled like bile.

"Hang on!" she yelled to her companion, but the dog was losing energy, and fast. Nimh doubled her efforts, focusing on nothing but the end of the bat, until some of the leeches sensed danger or perhaps smelled the blood of their own and retreated to the shadows. Now she could focus on the ones that clung to Kodiak.

Kodi trembled on his paws and fell, and each time it took him longer and longer to get up. Nimh smashed the ones that detached, and slowly she saw more and more of her dog. He was shaking, and thin, and as Nimh peeled off the last leech and crushed it under her foot, she saw that Kodi had fallen and was no longer trying to rise.

She stood there, motionless, holding her dripping bat. Kodiak twitched and his eyes opened, staring up at her. He whimpered, twitched his tail once, and lay still. Nimh dropped the bat and fell to her knees and buried her face in his fur, which was slick with blood. She could feel his ribs against her forehead. He was freezing to the touch. She felt his heart shudder once and then it, too, was still.

She was crying, but crying would not revive her fallen companion. With her eyes closed, she muttered apologies that would go unheard in the empty gym. The bleachers were extended from the walls, as if all that had just occurred had been a spectacle to a quiet and invisible audience of spirits. Gray light filtered somewhere from above. Nimh neither heard nor cared about the leeches. Her only friend in this hell, her guardian angel, was dead.

Something changed against the skin of her forehead. No longer did she feel the wiry hair of her dog, instead, she felt the softness of bare skin. She brought her head up and there, lying before her, was the naked and bloodied body of a boy her age. Not just any boy, either, but someone she knew very well.

"Sam…" Nimh choked. "Oh my God. Sam? It was you all along?"

She covered her mouth with both hands, stifling a long and drawn-out wail of disbelief, of grief. Sam's eyes were open, big and brown, gazing up at her. She lowered a shaking hand and closed the lids of the eyes she had used to dream about, those long afternoons at the mental hospital, waiting anxiously until the next therapy dog day when he would bring Jasmine. His body was thin, the ribs more pronounced, although she had only seen him without a shirt one time, when they had snuck off into the woods unbeknownst to her caretakers.

Remembering him as he was, alive and affectionate, one of the few who genuinely cared about her, made Nimh physically sick, and she crawled away from him to vomit. Her brain dizzy from the effort, she turned back to Sam's body, the body of her friend, her protector, and she shook her head and covered her own eyes so that she could not see.

"What else?" she said to the shadows. "What more can you possibly take from me? My past, my identity, my friends…all of it turned to shit."

And the shadows remained ever-silent. They seemed to amass a thickness, swelling in on her. She was no longer welcome here. Nimh ripped off the tatters of her shirt and covered Sam's nakedness as best she could. She could find another shirt.

But could she really just leave his body here, for those things to devour? Nimh was torn by the agony of it, but she knelt and kissed Sam's frozen cheek, brushing his hair aside and whispering, "I'm so sorry Sam. I love you." She paused, swallowing tears, swallowing grief and self-hatred. The leeches were gathering again, she could hear them rustling and whipping about in the darkness beneath the bleachers.

"You protected me, and I left you. Now I'm going to leave you again, and for good. I'll never forgive myself. I'll never forget you."

She stood up, grabbed the baseball bat, and took one last look at him, pale and in the position of a sleeping dog. She had no time to wonder why, or how, this transformation had been possible. Nothing made sense here. Better to leave it at that. Or she would have to accept that she had ignored possible signs, little hints of intelligence: the way he encouraged her and led her to safety and killed the things that hunted them. His abounding spirit and bravery and concern. No, she couldn't endure it. She blocked the memories, numbing up her mind.

Nimh ran out of the gym, up the stairs and into the faculty lounge, where she knew would be a lost and found bin. She grabbed a red plaid shirt from the bin and threw it on. Then she grabbed a black, oversized sweatshirt and threw that on as well. There were no shoes, but she didn't really care. As if all that had happened wasn't enough, she faced another dilemma. She didn't know where to go now that she had no one to protect, no one to keep her company, no one to protect HER. Then something hard and cold touched her thigh as she leaned against the wall. The key from the evidence box was still in her pocket.

_There's still Nichole. Nichole is here somewhere, even if she is supposed to be dead. Maybe I'm dead. Do I really care anymore?_

No. The only thing she did care about was discovering the truth—the truth of what had happened that night that Nichole had met her end. Somehow, if she could just remember, it would answer everything. It would explain why Sam had to die, why Nichole was haunting her, and why she was in this paranormal dimension, this delusion, this purgatory. The door to the high school slammed behind her, and once more she stumbled out into the mist.


	16. The Other Doctor

Chapter 16: The Other Doctor

For the first time since her unwanted stay in Silent Hill, Nimh was overcome with a sense of purpose. She left the empty high school, where the body of the only person she had come close to loving (she couldn't quite call it real love, because she had never gotten that chance, being dead, or in purgatory, or whatever) lay in the gymnasium, consumed by living shadows. As she took to the hateful sidewalks that led nowhere once more, the ash fell from the sky like snow, and the mist thickened to a point where it was almost a solid presence in her lungs.

_The sky is changing_, she thought, and her entire body hummed in response to this change. She knew that she was not quite alive; nothing in this place was ever _full_. All was waste. She should be crippled with despair, and yet she was up and walking. It baffled her. How? Even if she was crazy, how could she let such a thing as Sam's death just roll off of her?

_Because it was not the real Sam_, she assured herself. _The real Sam is somewhere else, living his life in a place of sun and warmth. Not here. This world is just an illusion._

In that moment, just after having finished that particular thought, she stepped off the curb and onto something sharp. Pain seared through her foot, ripping the breath from her lungs in a dreadful hiss, and she slammed her buttocks on the ground. She brought the bottom of her foot into her lap. Blood poured steadily from an inch-long slit that a sliver of glass had torn into her heel.

"Fuck!" Nimh growled under her breath. For a long minute, she fought back the urge to rage, to cry and spit obscenities and break everything that she could around her. Rocking back and forth, she searched her tattered memory for a mantra, anything, to get the fuzz out of her brain.

"Take me down, six underground…" she sang, half-stuttering. "The ground beneath your feet…"

The wound stung. It was like a slap to the face from the gods, as if to say, _if it's real enough to hurt, it's real enough to matter._

"Calm it down, bring it round, to way high up your street."

_I am going to die if I stay here any longer. That demon-thing will find me and kill me, or worse…_

Still she sang, "I can see, like nothin' else, in me you're better than I wanna be. Don't think…cause I understand…I can't. Don't think cause I'm talkin', we're friends."

That did the trick. Where had she heard that song before? Oh yes, it had been a favorite of hers and Nichole's. She stood cautiously and debated going to the nurse's office in the high school. The idea of going back there made her want to puke again. She limped for the nearest strip of buildings, ignoring the boarded up storefronts until she found a corner store. She picked up a brick and was about to smash the glass of the front door, when she recalled the predicament that had gotten her into this present mess in the first place.

"All right. How about just trying the doorknob?" she asked aloud. Without Kodiak (Sam, she reminded herself dully) to talk to, speaking seemed pointless. She did it again anyway.

"Please," she beseeched of the door. "Please open." Her hand wrapped around the silver knob and turned. The door clicked stubbornly and didn't move. Of course it didn't move. Nimh thudded her head against the glass with a _bong!_ and closed her eyes. The door groaned, pitched forward, and before she knew it, she was on her stomach.

Should she get up? Yes, getting up would be nice. She rose, first to her elbows and then the rest, slowly. Dust floated freely in the air, but the store's shelves looked promising. She ambled down the aisles, past old cans and boxes with faded wrappers, and found a first aid kid. After treating her foot as best as she could, she left the corner store and continued, until she found the first clothing store in sight. Men's clothes. She wasn't feeling picky.

This store required her to break the glass, but she managed to just smash a small part of it and reach her hand in to unlock the door.

_If I ever get out of here, I'm going to have a tough time adjusting to locks again in the real world_, she thought, and swallowed. If she ever made it out of here. What a silly, naïve thing to think. She went about the clothing store more somberly, settling for a pair of hiking boots. She pulled on two layers of socks to pad her injured foot, and set it down gently. She increased pressure and found that she could walk almost normally, and run, with a slight limp. It was only a temporary solution. The wound would have to be sterilized and…

"Oh god damn it, what does it matter?" she muttered, and walked on.

Once on the edge of town, she stood in front of a tunnel that led under a portion of the hillside. Metal gates and ply board blocked her way, but with her good foot, she kicked a hole for herself.

_I am the kind of person that makes holes_, she thought, not understanding where the thought came from. Confusion was a familiar phenomenon. She waited before entering, listening for danger. Her instincts told her there was no danger this way. This was where she was meant to be, somehow. She stepped into the tunnel.

A soft glow attracted her gaze, to the right. There were three cement steps and a white door, lit by a white light. The door had a wooden trim and was covered with squares—pictures, Nimh realized, as she walked closer. She went up the three steps and examined things more closely. There were photos of her and Nichole, some of them with Sam, some with other friends. Most of them were in Nichole's basement, or in the woods. They had never really gone to the mall or the beach or to sleepovers. But they were still smiling. Almost. Nimh looked into her own eyes (Michelle's/Annie's) and thought she saw an empty glaze in them, an opaque, withdrawn expression buried under her smile.

"Why would she ever have been friends with the likes of me?" Nimh asked, placing two fingers on Nichole's face. In this picture, a close-up for the Internet, Nichole had turned to the side, her auburn hair shielding half her face, her strawberry lips pouty. Nichole was the kind of girl who pretended to be sad, and jaded, and fed up with everything, because it was cool. But it suited her.

_I was depressed by default. I had no choice in the matter_, she mused. Aware of the insanity of it all, standing in a dark tunnel, alone, with ashes in her hair and creatures stalking the shadows, a diary of her heart's outpourings left for the dust in a shed somewhere, the girl with three names took a single, silver key out of her pocket and unlocked the door.

Light, piercing and pure, burned her eyes. She felt them tear as her tortured pupils struggled to adjust to this new change in her environment. By God, it never seemed to end! Patterns of darkness, variants of shades began to blur into her vision. The blurs gradually became blobs, and with more blinking, she could see the vague outline of a figure seated behind something large and rectangular—a desk? Behind the figure was most certainly a window, letting in that scalding light. For an insane moment, she wished the light would go away, become the shade of Silent Hill, illuminating but never warming, like an autumn sun choked by white clouds. And then, she heard an all-too familiar voice say,

"Hello, Michelle. I'm glad you've finally made it."

Her frozen insides thawed a little at the voice, made them tense in revulsion and fear.

"No," she moaned. The light finally receded, a little, like a wave, and she was staring directly into the face of Dr. Rutilus. She went to take a step back, to exit out the door she had come from, but as her blistered and bloodied fingers touched the doorknob, it disintegrated into millions of tiny particles, as if it had been sitting there for eons.

"I'm afraid there's no turning back for you, my dear," Dr. Rutilus spoke again. Cool and refined and soft, was the voice of her tormentor. Nimh's heart began to thrum in her throat. She looked anxiously left and right, for escape routes. There were only walls, bookshelves, and the window. Outside, there was only a blazing white. She had the dizzying notion that they were up very high, amidst the clouds, even. She cursed herself for not grabbing a weapon…but she was so very, very tired, and she wasn't thinking properly.

"You needn't fear me, Michelle," Dr. Rutilus assured. He saw the distrust on her face, however, and nodded. "Although I understand why you would."

Nimh tried to speak, but all she could see was the blackened thing, pooling in on itself and dead, on the floor of the animal experimentation room in Stonewall: the remains of Dr. Scythe, who had for so long lived and tortured under the guise of a benign therapist. Nothing came out of her mouth except a stuttering grunt. She felt her fingers close on a hard metal object sitting on one of his bookshelves. It was a rock of some kind.

"Are you going to try and fight me?" he asked coolly. His spectacles hung down his straight, slightly arched nose, with its noble little nostrils, his eyes glittering at her. He had cropped his hair to one side, the way they used to do in old movies. Nimh hated him, hated his quasi-benevolence…and yet, and yet…she felt fresh tears swimming in the ducts of her eyes.

"Look," he said, and pointed to her right. She obeyed, to find that a person-sized looking glass had appeared that hadn't been there only a moment ago. Her logical brain, after all the beatings it had taken, still insisted that she was hallucinating. But there was her reflection, grimy, blackened, and smeared with blood and filth. There was her matted hair, her torn clothes, her sagging shoulders and torso, hidden by the bag of cloth that had once been a shirt.

"That's you, isn't it?" he inquired. "It must be so strange, to look at oneself after so long."

Dumbfounded, Nimh half-stumbled over to the mirror like a Neanderthal being introduced to one for the first time. She held one hand up to her reflection, to find that her reflection did the same. She blinked. The mirror girl blinked back.

In the back of her mind she heard a chair squeak as the body occupying it got up. She was too fascinated by the mirror girl, although her hand tightened its grip around the rock. She touched her raggedy-Ann hair. The mirror girl did the same. She smiled, showing teeth that shone brilliantly against the stain of her skin. She looked like a mud person, like a freshly murdered corpse come back to life. But there was color to her eyes, as bloodshot as they were. The brown of her eyes was honest and true—a little frightened, and certainly wavering from object to object, the eyes of one who has confidence in nothing.

She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. How long had it been since she'd felt such a thing as warm flesh?

Then she remembered whose hand it was, and she spun around, crying out and raising the rock, her defenses aquiver.

Dr. Rutilus held up both hands in a gesture of peace. He was so…nerdy, in his tweed jacket and pants and white shirt, with its bowtie nestled against his collar, like some bizarre decoration on an exotic jungle bird.

He saw her expression as she thought this, and smiled, a genuine symbol of good-humor from one human to another.

"Yes, I am not who you think I am. And in a way, I am."

Nimh blinked. "What?"

He shook his head. "Don't play games, Michelle. You know why you're here. Everything that you've suffered has led you here."

Nimh lowered her head a little, like a shy child. "I've got to help Nichole. She's stuck here, in this, this…"

"No need to name it," he told her, shoving both hands in his pockets and leaning his backside against his wooden desk. He gestured outside the window. "I couldn't explain this place to you if I tried. I am only here because of you."

Now that was something she could not just ignore. "What do you mean?" she demanded, the strain audible in her voice. "Who are you? Why are you here?"

"I am Dr. Rutilus, your therapist," he answered. "Although, not the real Dr. Rutilus, of course."

"Just how Sam wasn't the real Sam." Her eyes widened, almost comically. "But then…the other doctor, he exists—existed—only in this world?"

He nodded. "By now you realize that everything here has been pulled from your own life and consciousness. The events orchestrated in this world have both revealed things to you and guided you."

"If you want to call living in fear of your life every waking moment 'guidance,'" Nimh spat. "If you want to call being," she stumbled over the words, unsure if she wanted to continue. "Being assaulted by your therapist and stalked by a phallic-enraged demon, watching your boyfriend die, your best friend's body running around like some voodoo victim…" She grabbed at her hair with one hand and yanked on the roots to stop herself from freaking out.

He glanced awkwardly to the side, then gazed at her. "I have no control over that, Michelle," he said kindly enough. "I'm sorry."

"Stop calling me that," Nimh growled.

"But it's your real name." He shrugged.

"That girl is dead," she said, and there was deep-seeded anger and loss in her voice that she was slightly afraid of. "Michelle Williams is long gone. What remains of her is in this," she placed both hands on her chest, just above her breasts, "This disgusting _thing_ of a person that doesn't rightly feel anything, not love, not joy, not hope…just pain and sadness."

Dr. Rutilus went into his desk and took out something that both astonished and pleased her. It was a Newton's Cradle. He set the pendulums on the desk and pulled the endmost one back, let it go, and sent off the chain reaction. Nimh's eyes watched the metal spheres travel out, swing back, the vibrations travel down the middle spheres, then the sphere on the other end swung out, came back, collided.

Another memory came back to her, one that had been in the process of traveling through her own density, and now that it was arriving there was no stopping it. She remembered a sun-filled office that smelled of pine and paper, of bookshelves filled with psychology textbooks and literature, of strange artifacts and a warm sofa. Dr. Rutilus' beautiful office and his calm face were not a façade. She broke her gaze from the Cradle.

"I lied about you, didn't I?" Nimh asked. Dr. Rutilus didn't nod, but the answer was plain. She let the rest of the idea take form. "I lied to the other patients, I told them, told them that you were evil, that you had two sides. I used your hypnosis therapy as a weapon against you, said that you did it to take advantage of your victims. And there were no animal testing labs in the basement."

"Quite absurd, really, to think of such a thing," her doctor smiled wanly, approaching the mirror and examining her in its reflection. "Quite characteristic of a troubled young girl. But she was very lucky."

Nimh snorted in disgust. "How?" Her injured foot began to trouble her again, and she sat down on the couch.

"Because she had friends."

She nodded solemnly. "I did. Nichole was my only friend in high school. We did a lot together. She made me feel like a person, more than my foster families could with all their speeches about 'belonging' and 'acceptance'." She dug her nails into her legs, her head lowered. Another memory began to stir, and as she felt the nature of it, she was overcome with panic. "I don't want to remember anymore!"

"You can't stop yourself," Dr. Rutilus soothed. "It's all right. You were admitted to Stonewall for threatening self harm and disrupting a school day with your behavior. The police came and took you away, and they sent you to me, to help you."

"Yes, I know!" Nimh cried. "I knew I was screwed up. I told Nichole I was sorry, and then the program wouldn't let me speak to her for seven months. When she finally visited me again…"

"Go on."

"I felt betrayed. I knew she couldn't help it, that it was the rules, but she could have TRIED to visit me. I was so angry, but I continued to be friends with her, with this, this grudge inside me. I hated and loved Nichole. She was everything I wanted to be—smart, artsy, one of the top students, loved by her family. She liked to pretend that she was a loner, but really, that just made her more cool, more mysterious. I was a loner by default. My peers thought I was insane."

She stopped, rolling the rock back and forth in her lap while the pendulums swayed to and fro, click and clack, knocking with their weird little hollow sound in the quiet of his office.

"You're not insane, Michelle. Just misunderstood. Continue, won't you?"

"All right…so I was allowed visitors, because everyone thought I was improving. But I wanted to be free. I felt betrayed by everyone for being confined to Stonewall. I had no one to fall back on. Then I met Sam, and placed all my hopes and happiness in him. And though he genuinely cared for me, I wanted more than his care. I wanted him to love me."

"And that's when the lies really took hold, wasn't it?"

Nimh nodded, flushing under the grime on her cheeks. She felt ashamed, and yet she knew she had to tell him everything. She had to tell someone, before the end, whatever that may be. "I spread lies around Stonewall, saying that my doctor, that you, were using your hypnosis to brainwash me. You had a secret underground lab where you experimented on animals, and it was soundproof and well-hidden, and that's why inspectors never found it. I told them you took me there and did horrible things to me. Then one of the patients asked me to prove it, so I started hurting myself. Bruises, cuts, stuff like that. I even slit my own wrists. I knew how to do it without dying—I had looked it up online before being committed."

She paused to take a shuddering breath. "It all got out of my hands. The more vulnerable patients believed my little act, I became a sort of living drama for them. Entertainment. I hinted things to Sam when he would visit, and he was determined to help me. So determined." She shook her head. "He was such a caring person. But those were the kinds of people I took advantage of. They were like…insects, almost. Scuttling about, living their little insect lives, and I was their food."

"I don't know if Sam ever found out it was a lie. He stopped visiting me after a while, and it drove me mad. I convinced one patient who suffered from severe paranoia that all of my lies about Dr. Scythe and his torture chambers were true. His name was Caleb Fisher."

"The man who would run down Nichole in the dead of night," Dr. Rutilus added.

Nimh wiped tears way from her eyes with her sleeve. Her lower lip trembled as she spoke again. "Yes. I thought that she was stealing Sam away from me. When she came to visit me on the night of her death, she asked me if someone was hurting me. I was so caught up in my lies that I took her to the basement and tried to show her the secret entrance. She just stood there, watching me, with a pathetic look on her face. She was tired of me, tired of my illness. We had an argument in a closet, and I told her to get out. I didn't want to see her ever again, and I accused her of coveting Sam."

"But she insisted that she wasn't seeing him. Sam had told everything about Dr. Scythe, convinced that someone was hurting me, somehow. But Nichole knew me better than he did. She knew I could make up stories and lie, expertly so. But she had to know for sure, and that's why she came. But I was too blinded by anger and jealousy to see it."

Nimh dabbed at her eyes and held the rock in one palm, raising it to her face. She stared at it as she spoke. "Caleb Fisher heard our argument, and he heard Nichole threaten to tell the staff at Stonewall about my lies. But the staff, I had told him, were in on the conspiracy as well. He killed Nichole because he thought she was going to betray me and reveal my secret to you. And then you would have silenced me, and anyone else who believed me. I killed her with my lies."

The rock slipped from her hand and slammed to the floor, where it cracked clean in two. Nimh glimpsed down and picked up one half, to find that the inside was filled with blue crystals. Dr. Rutilus picked up the other half and pulled something out of the hollow center, which was embedded in the crystals. He grabbed Nimh's free wrist and placed the cold object on her palm. It was a shiny pendulum on a string, the one that had belonged to Dr. Scythe. It cast a circle of white on the ceiling, reflecting the light beaming through the window.

Nimh flinched and nearly dropped it, and the reflected light quivered with her trembling like a fairy. She set her half of the geode down and thrust the pendulum in between them. "Why would you give me this?" she asked, disturbed.

Dr. Rutilus picked up her fallen half of the geode. "You must help Nichole. Sam and Dr. Scythe, along with the other creatures here, were parts taken from your own design. But Nichole's soul is at risk. If she lingers here any longer, she may be lost forever." He brought the two halves together. "Only you can set her free. It is your responsibility, Michelle."

Nimh's fingers clasped around the pendulum tightly. She nodded once in affirmation and stood. Her entire body felt heavy with the burden, but it was weight that she could bear. She had been bearing it all along without knowing it.

"I understand. I have to do this, don't I? There's no turning back," she affirmed, pretending she didn't hear the note of weakness in her voice.

A flicker of red shot across the doctor's glasses. Nimh pretended she didn't see it as he muttered,

"No, there isn't."

"Where do I go from here?" She felt a new fear growing in her gut, more powerful than the horrors that she had faced, alone, in the darkness. It was the fear of doubt, that she would not be able to bring Nichole's wayward spirit to the light. She felt a dark abyss opening, threatening to swallow them whole, tiny specks of flesh devoured by the black hole of oblivion.

Finally, Dr. Rutilus answered, "The way is through you."

He pointed to the mirror. Nimh walked over to the looking glass and met her own gaze with as much nerve as she could muster. She watched herself place the pendulum around her neck, saw a spark of light catch on its smooth metal face. She did not move as something like ink ran down Dr. Rutilus' face in dark lines. The light outside the window was changing, stained with the gray and brown and smoky hues of a fire.

_I'm not safe here anymore._

She placed her hand on the glass. It was warm to the touch, like a living thing. Behind her, Dr. Rutilus shuddered and made an inhuman noise. Frozen with fear, she saw his body enveloped in amorphous, dirty, water-like substance. There was a sickening gurgle, like sewage gulped by a drain, or someone choking on his own blood. Another figure rose out of the substance, breathing deep, guttural breaths, growing, stretching, the head emerging, a triangular clamp of metal, followed by the ropey shoulders and butcher's smock. The pyramid demon had arisen.

Not turning away from the reflection, Nimh said, with no emotion, "I am going now. Follow me if you wish."

But the demon made no move for her. It was waiting, waiting on her to make the first move. It was to be now—move forward or die here, horribly, with Nichole's spirit still lost and hopeless. Nimh closed her eyes, felt the demon's sinewy arm reach for her, closing the space between them quickly with fingers that could collapse a skull like an orange. At the very last second, she stepped forward, into the looking glass, the surface parting away from her. It was like stepping through a curtain of warm water.

Nimh opened her eyes.


	17. A Release of Delirium

Chapter 17: A Release of Delirium

The world turned deep crimson, the color of living tissue. Nimh stood in a hallway, the very floors, walls, and ceiling of which seemingly stitched out of living tissue, thousands of tiny veins all pumping and retracting. Steam arose from the floor beneath her old-fashioned sneakers, unpleasantly warm, and carrying the thick odors of sulfur and burned materials: scorched leaves, singed flesh, melting rubber. She heard a not-too-distant dripping and chains jingling against one another.

_It's as if I'm inside a living thing_, _and an old, old machine, all at once_, Nimh marveled, half in fear and in amazement. In all her wildest fantasies, wrapped up in her own demented lies at Stonewall, she could have never imagined such horrid things on her own. Never.

She made her way down the hall, taking it at a steady pace, her ears honed for attack on either side. Nothing must get in her way of reaching Nichole. She owed her former best friend that much. At length she came to the end of the long hallway and hit a dead end. A giant pipe about twice her width ran up into the ceiling and down into the floor. Instinctively, she knew she must go down. Wherever she was, she would have to go deeper into the bowels of it to get to Nichole. It would most likely mean her imminent death. She was afraid, but the fear was held back by her determination and her guilt.

"Okay," she murmured under her breath, looking the pipe over. Part of the pipe had corrugated from constant water running across its metal surface, and the result was a human-sized, rusted rent in the pipe's surface. Nimh searched for something to strike against the pipe, but she was afraid to touch the walls. And the floor was made of a diamond-patterned metal grate, flat, without anything to pry up.

Nimh turned around and checked down the hallway once, making sure nothing was following her. The pyramid demon had not entered through the wall. He was not a part of her, despite what Dr. Rutilus had said. He was a punisher, a tormentor, yes, but not birthed from any piece of her.

_But perhaps he is a part of all of us_. She shuddered. A flickering caught her eye, a dapple of white light that darted across the wall to her left. She reversed direction and faced the pipe again. She saw nothing. Perhaps it had been her mind playing tricks. She turned around again and the light flashed momentarily on the ceiling. She looked up. Nothing.

_What the hell?_

Nimh took a few cautious steps forward, but stopped again when the light returned, briefly. She marked the angle and followed it back to the source, and realized with a little jolt of revelation that the light had been reflected off of the pendulum she now wore around her neck.

Her hand strayed to the little circle of flat metal. She waited, watching. There! A beam of light leapt at the opposite end of the hallway, a small spark of illumination in the thick blackness. She jogged toward it, one hand on the pendulum, keeping it steady.

"Nichole?" she called, quite out of breath after the first few yards. She kept going despite not receiving an answer. Now and then the reflection bobbed on a wall, or the floor, or the ceiling, only for a moment, and then it vanished. Someone, somewhere, was shining a light, trying to grab her attention.

She went on, calling Nichole's name, and began to pass doors that looked to have been white, at one point in time, but were now crosshatched by brownish-red cracks. She tried every lock, but none would give. Eventually she came to a T-section and had to choose between right and left. Fortunately, the reflection appeared again, to her left, and she followed.

As she inspected and passed more doors, she underwent a sense of déjà vu. As she walked past the second to last door before the hallway turned right, she heard an old man's fumbling, foreign language, crying and muffled.

_My God,_ she thought. _It's the same voice from the beginning. I must be in Stonewall._

That explained the familiarity of the corridors, but did little to ease her terror and uncertainty. At one point she had to stop and sit down on the floor and breathe, deep, calming breaths, rocking back and forth. She only did this for half a minute before continuing, she did not feel safe standing still for any longer than that.

At last the light guided her to an open door and she peeped around it to look in at the room. The stark white tiles and bed sheets stung her eyes, even after such a brief amount of time back in the dark and crimson corridors. She stepped inside the room and searched for any abnormalities—here was an empty bed, the sheets ruffled, here was a porcelain toilet, drained f water. It looked like the room she had been captive in, what felt like so long ago, but the piles of food trays and trash and broken tiles that she remembered were not there.

Then something under the bed caught her eye, a blurry square that stood out from the shadows, and she dropped to her knees and poked her head underneath the mattress. A sledgehammer was tangled in the springs of the bed. She grasped the cold, heavy head of the hammer and wrenched the handle free. She pulled herself out from under the bed and stood up, hefting her new tool in her hands.

No sooner had she darted out of the room when she was attacked by a creature she had never seen before. A gray blur descending from a pipe on the ceiling, swooping down like a vulture, shrieking. Her eyes just barely made out a lethal set of talons aimed at her face. She ducked and swung the hammer over her head, but she miscalculated the weight of it and the hammer dragged her down onto the hard tile floors, knocking the breath out of her. The creature wheeled and came at her again, and this time she saw large, black, empty eyes, two seed-shaped pits for nostrils, and the long, razor-sharp beak that was open in a hiss of malice, the curled tongue lined with purple muscles and the back of a throat that bulged and taughtened.

Nimh stood shakily and tightened her grip around the smooth handle of the hammer. The creature let loose another ear-splitting cry and extended its talons, aiming for her eyes. She had little opportunity to time her swing, and so she swung again blindly. The hammer missed and smacked against the wall, the shock so great that she was forced to drop it and cringed. The bird-ghost's needlelike talons did not miss; they raked across the flesh of her right shoulder.

She clutched at her wounded upper arm, heaving deep, rattling breaths, and when the banshee-ghost-bird-creature dove at her again, she ran, ducking just enough to feel the gust of its wings. Now she had to choose: the hammer or, very likely, her eyes and face. The bird landed on top of the pipe, just above the door to the open room, and Nimh shuddered to think that it had been watching her the entire time. It leered down at her with its empty sockets, its rotten skull cracked and bare in patches, long, dark, ragged hair hanging down around the sides. It had bulky, powerful shoulders and a wingspan that nearly stretched from wall to wall. Its chest, she noticed for the first time, had two female breasts buried under downy feathers and coarse dark hair. Pieces of flesh and wispy rags trailed down the split tail-feathers, and the eye-watering smell it had released from attacking her was something like mildew and bird shit mixed together.

_I used to know what these creatures were called_, she thought. In her head she only thought _banshee_, even though she knew it was wrong. The hammer lay about fifteen feet from her current location, and the banshee was perched above and just behind it. It ruffled its wings and cocked its head, the breasts like two small tumors swaying with the movement. Disgusting, miserable creature. All she wanted was the fucking hammer, was that too much to ask? It was then that she remembered the thing's name, and by remembering, she had power over her fear at last.

"Harpy!" Nimh accused, and she sprinted for the hammer, drawing her head into her shoulders. The bird, startled at her outburst or perhaps cocky, waited another second or two before it screeched and dove. Nimh flattened her body as her fingers grasped the handle, and she landed on one knee, pushed off, spun, and swung. The hammer collided between the Harpy's muscular neck and shoulder.

It squawked and crashed to the ground, floundering in a torrent of wings and feathers and dust. Nimh placed her foot between the harpy's breasts, pinning it down, and hesitated, pitying the twitching, squealing creature before her. Then a fresh wave of pain stung her shoulder, and she swung the hammer overhead, bringing it down with a splintering crunch of bone and brain.

She lifted her foot and picked up the hammer, stepping over the smashed remains of the harpy without a second thought. Her shoulder throbbed and stung. She felt the wounds gingerly with her other hand. Even in the dim light, she could see that her skin was puckered and pink around each slash mark. The harpy had something highly infectious on its claws, and had introduced it straight into her bloodstream.

_Don't have a lot of time now_, she thought, and told herself not to panic. In truth, she felt overwhelmingly serene, but perhaps that was because she was so damned tired. By the time she reached the pipe, she was trembling and her forehead was slick with sweat. Despite her revulsion to the bleeding walls and rusted tiles, she sat down, and felt a tiny, pumping heartbeat beneath her that was not her own. She rested for a few minutes, in the silence and the gloom, and soon she drifted off into a state of half-sleep, half-wakefulness. Her shoulder bled freely, but she was so fatigued she hardly felt it.

Someone was singing. It was nice. She couldn't understand the words, but it was some kind of chanting, a prayer or ritual song. It was Nichole's voice. Nimh stood up, wide awake and transfixed, and made her way over to the pipe. A girl's voice reverberated up through the metal, garbled and echoing, nearly lost in the din of the dripping water and a thousand other creaking, grinding noises.

As soon as she reached the pipe and couldn't walk any farther, the voice stopped. Silence invaded her ears once again. Nimh touched the corroded metal and felt little chips of rust flake away under her fingertips. She got the hammer and hefted it, choosing the spot on the rusted area that, were it human, would be near the heart. She swung and the hammer sank through the rusted surface like a fist through butter. Again and again she laid into it, until shreds of red metal piled at her feet. She set the hammer aside, unable to take it with her, and squeezed through the opening.

Cool breaths of air wafted up from the small dark space beneath her. She took a deep breath and stepped off the edge, backwards and down, sliding, a morsel of living food down a metal throat.

She landed swiftly on hard ground. Stars of agony exploded in her line of vision and she lay there, motionless, but recovering. Her shoulder blade ached in addition to the surface wounds, now, and she had a bad feeling that the infection, or poison, or whatever it was, was spreading. She sat up and looked around. She was on the edge of a forest, behind her, the opening of a sewage pipe leading out of a cement wall.

Nimh got to her feet at last and tore the bottom lining of her shirt and tied the ends to make a sling. She cradled her injured arm and limped into the woods. The gray trees were immersed in mist, soothing and calm, and not quite so frightening as the streets. Her steps were muffled by thick moss that grew underfoot.

Light spiraled out from her pendant, dancing across the bark of the trees. She followed it, backtracking every so often when the reflection seemed indirect or off. The light led her to a clearing, where a giant hole swallowed everything, about twenty-five feet from where she stood. Directly across the hole stood Nichole, holding a flashlight and with a stony expression on her face. She was wearing a white autopsy gown. She lowered the flashlight and stared at Nimh.

Nimh stared back, unsure of what to do next. She raised her good arm and waved. Nichole took an uncertain step backward.

"You're Nichole's spirit, right?" Nimh asked. The girl shrugged. The hole gaped between them, ominous and large. She was afraid her friend would jump down and be lost forever in that blackness. There would be no returning from there, she thought.

"Do you remember me?" Nimh tried again.

Nichole nodded. Even at this fifty-foot span of separation, Nimh felt knives from Nichole's eyes boring into her. She was angry and confused, Nimh knew. She had died prematurely and had lost so much: a promising time through school, her dream job, her family and friends, the sheer joy of rising in the morning and simply _being_. A crazed man had snatched it all away from her, violently, and Nimh was the root cause of this theft of life.

"That's why you called me with that light," Nimh said. She grasped the pendulum chain and lifted it over her head, dangling the pendant before her. "You called me with this."

"I called you," Nichole's spirit spoke at last. Her voice matched the singing Nimh had heard in the pipe. It was icier than her living voice, lined with cold rage. "I called you so I could see you face when you get what you deserve."

"What?"

Nimh spun around, but it was too late. A harpy creature flapped and swooped, pushing her backwards. She ducked, the vulture-woman flew overhead and soared out of sight. It would be back, she thought. She had to act quickly.

"I'm sorry," she called, making her way around the hole toward Nichole. Nichole didn't move, but she looked ready to turn and run at the slightest insult.

Nimh held up her good hand and walked steadily. "I spread all those nasty lies at Stonewall. It was wrong of me. But I was lonely, and hurt, and jealous of you, Nicky."

"Hurt?" Nichole sneered. "Compared to what? He ran into me with a _car_, Michelle!"

Nimh winced at her old name, which seemed more like a swear than a thing to be known by.

"Oh, that's right," Nichole spat. "I forgot you don't go by that name anymore. What is it you're calling yourself now?"

"You can still call me Michelle, Nichole. But I'm not the Michelle that you knew."

"Damn right you aren't," the spirit said flatly. "The Michelle that I knew never hurt anyone. She didn't lie or deceive. Not like you. And I thought you were my friend." The last sentence was rife with despair and grief.

Nimh said gently, "I still am your friend."

Nichole laughed.

"I mean it," Nimh continued. "All I've ever done in this place is try to find answers, like you."

Nichole looked taken aback by this statement. She glanced right and left and shifted on her bare, white feet. There was less than ten feet between them now. Nichole took another step back and Nimh heard the swoosh of the harpy's wings somewhere above them. Only it sounded like there was more than one. A whole fleet of them drifted lazily in the air, black phantoms wheeling and pinioning lazily, waiting to strike. They were under her command, acting on Nichole's thirst for vengeance. If they all descended on her, there would be no fending them off…

A wave of dizziness struck Nimh, and she teetered a bit. Her arm was numb, her shoulder and back burning with fever.

"I don't have much time left," Nimh finally gasped. "Nichole…please forgive me," she croaked.

Nichole's stricken face gaped at her, then morphed into a jack-o-lantern of spite.

"Why should I?" Nichole demanded. "We're dead now. There's nothing in forgiveness." The harpies chattered and flapped their wings, eager to begin, to exact their revenge.

"You want to keep running like this?" Nimh retorted. A harpy screeched behind her, and she lowered her head instinctively. It flew overhead and did no harm, this time.

Nichole lingered on the edge of the woods and the clearing. Behind them was the hole. Nimh was fearful of the hole, but they were slowly edging away from it, and perhaps it would not be their final resting place after all.

As she got closer, Nimh saw that Nichole's eyes were red and puffy. Her waxen features had just the slightest tinge of pink. She was not just an empty shell. She was a soul.

"I miss my life. I miss my home and my parents and going to school. I miss Christmas and TV in the morning and doing soccer drills. I miss hanging out with you," Nichole sobbed. "What in the hell happened?"

The fever was going to her brain now. Nimh's vision swam and Nichole's white form seemed to glow with celestial light. It would be so lovely, to lose herself in that light, and never have to worry or suffer again.

_Almost finished, almost done_, a tiny voice murmured in her borderline-delirium.

"I was wrong," Nimh murmured. "I'm sorry."

Nichole walked over to her and hesitated, then put one hand on Nimh's good shoulder to steady her. Her fingers were icy, but Nimh felt them distantly, as if she were immersed in water.

"What's happening to you?" Nichle asked. But Nimh did not answer. She pitched forward and Nichole helped ease her into a sitting position on the ground. They sat together and stared at the massive cavity in the earth, the harpies circling above.

"You're hurt," Nichole said, and pointed to Nimh's shoulder. Nimh winced and waved her away.

"It doesn't matter. Just tell me one thing. Do you forgive me?"

Nichole's spirit sighed. "Yes."

Nimh smiled. "Thank you."

For a long while they sat there, friend resting in the arms of a friend, one with eyes closed, the other gazing at the place where the earth crumbled away.

"Michelle, what do we do now?" Nichole asked. Nimh did not hear the fear in her voice. The harpies circled and crooned hungrily.

"Just a few more minutes," Nimh whispered, her hand stroking the pendulum around her neck, then eventually falling still. "I'm so tired. It's taken me so long."

Someone was shaking her. Nimh tried to wake up, but the infection was seeping through her veins and burning her brain. She didn't want to leave Nichole alone again, in that uncertain and threatening place called Silent Hill, but a sea of slumber called her true name, and she had to follow it. Now that she had Nichole's forgiveness, she wanted, more than anything, that eternal sleep, a sleep from which she would never awaken to new horrors. The spirit rocked her, singing softly under her breath, until the girl that was once Nichole felt Nimh's body subside, her muscles relax and her breath make one last escape.

Nichole held Nimh's bloodstained hand and closed her eyes. The harpies rasped and circled in on them, swooping lower and lower, hungry and murderous. Slowly, both girls began to fade, like old photographs, growing more and more blurred and finally transparent, until they both disappeared into thin air. The harpies each gave one last grunt of disappointment and took to the forest once more, on a new search for some other lost soul that had yet to awaken from its delirium.

~End

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_(A/N: Thanks to everyone for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to submit any reviews or critiques...but don't spoil anything for other readers! Again, Silent Hill is a product of Konami. The song Nimh sings earlier is called "6 Underground" and is written and performed by the Sneaker Pimps.)_


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